NEW STUDIES POINT TO NATURAL COVID-19 ORIGIN

Sir,

While the COVID-19 pandemic  was wreaking havoc throughout the world scientists and researchers have been knocking their heads trying determine the original cause of the disease. New evidence keeps emerging as the research continues. An animal market in China’s Wuhan really was the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a pair of new studies in the journal Science, published Tuesday that claimed to have tipped the balance in the debate about the virus’ origins. Answering the question of whether the disease spilt over naturally from animals to humans, or was it the result of a lab accident, is viewed as vital to averting the next pandemic and saving millions of lives.

Analysed

The first paper analysed the geographic pattern of COVID-19 cases in the outbreak’s first month, December 2019, showing the first cases were tightly clustered around the Huanan market. The second examined genomic data from the earliest cases to study the virus’ early evolution, concluding it was unlikely the coronavirus circulated widely in humans prior to November 2019. Both were previously posted as ‘preprints’ but have now been vetted by scientific peer review and appear in a prestigious journal. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.

Findings

But the findings moved him ‘to the point where now I also think it’s just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market,’ he told reporters on a call about the findings. Though the previous investigation had centred on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine whether it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier. This required neighbourhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was ‘zoonotic’ - that it jumped from animals to people. The first study’s team used mapping tools to determine the location of most of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding that 155 of them were in Wuhan.

Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market - and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus - including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed. The study authors also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019. The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app. ‘This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically,’ Worobey said in a statement. “It really originated at that market and spread out from there.” “Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not. Will we ever be able to know? No,” said co-author Kristian Anderson of The Scripps Research Institute.

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