A brand new peer-reviewed paper presents proof that the COVID-19 pandemic began in a seafood market in Wuhan, China, the place lots of the first circumstances of the illness had been recognized.
The paper, revealed Thursday within the scientific journal Cell, builds off preliminary analysis launched final yr that pointed to a raccoon canine as a attainable host transmitter of the illness to people.
One origin idea of the COVID-19 pandemic is that an animal contaminated with the virus handed it on to people on the Huanan seafood market in late 2019.
Thursday’s paper offers extra proof that animal spillover could have been accountable for the pandemic, though it can’t conclusively rule out the idea that people launched the virus to the market.
Researchers be aware within the examine, although, that this second idea is unlikely.
“The introduction by an animal trader infected by animals upstream of the market is further challenged by the probability that transmission chains dependent upon a single human would likely go extinct,” in response to the examine.
“A sustained interface between infected animals and humans in a market is more likely to result in the establishment of an epidemic.”
The worldwide crew of 23 researchers behind the examine discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was current in a number of stalls on the Wuhan market that additionally housed coronavirus-susceptible animals.
“We identify wildlife DNA in all SARS-CoV-2-positive samples from this stall, including species such as civets, bamboo rats, and raccoon dogs, previously identified as possible intermediate hosts,” researchers wrote within the paper.
However researchers can’t definitively say if the animals available in the market stall had been contaminated with the virus.
“The publicly available genomic and epidemiological data from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic remain incomplete, and future data from this time could shed further light on hypotheses regarding its emergence,” the paper reads.
