Researchers share new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals in Wuhan, China.
Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals—possibly those sold at the market—into humans at least twice in November or December 2019.
Some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. Namely, they say that the market could have just been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the place of the original spillover.
A research team from China including the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention has now genetically sequenced those positive samples, releasing the results in a preprint posted on 25 February. The scientists confirm that the samples contain SARS-CoV-2 sequences nearly identical to those that have been circulating in humans. Further, they show that the two original virus lineages circulating at the start of the pandemic, called A and B, were both present at the market.
In one, the team zeroed in on the southwestern section of the Huanan market, where live animals were sold as recently as 2019, as being the potential epicentre of the outbreak. They arrived at this conclusion by compiling information on the first known COVID-19 cases in China, as reported in various places, including the WHO investigation, newspaper articles, and from audio and video recordings of doctors and patients in Wuhan.
In a second report, Andersen and colleagues concluded that lineage A and lineage B of SARS-CoV-2 are too different from one another on a genetic level for one to have evolved into the other quickly in humans. Therefore, they suggest that the coronavirus must have evolved within non-human animals and that the two different lineages spread to humans separately.
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