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US researchers claim they've found where Covid-19 first originated.
President Donald Trump has been busy pushing his conspiracies about the 'true origins' of Covid-19 online while the Chinese government have recently been making their own claims about the pandemic.
In another uncovering of the pandemic, a group of researchers from the University of California, San Diego say they’ve discovered new evidence about where and when Covid-19 first emerged.
According to the study, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind Covid-19) may have started evolving in bats across western China and northern Laos as early as 2012.
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Analysing over 100 coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats, the team compared them with SARS-CoV-2 and its cousin SARS-CoV-1, the virus which caused the 2002 outbreak.
Their findings suggest the closest viral relatives to SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged five to seven years before the Covid outbreak in Wuhan.
Whereas the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-1 were found to have developed a decade before that virus caused an outbreak in Guangdong, southern China, in 2002.
The strange thing was that the ancestral viruses were traced 600 to 1,200 miles away from the cities where the outbreak occurred, the study suggested.
And since horseshoe bats have small home ranges of only a few square miles, the UC San Diego team argue that it's unlikely the animals themselves carried the viruses.
Instead, they believe the virus was carried by an intermediate host such as raccoon dogs or civets which were captured by wildlife traders and transported to major city markets.
These findings concur with what scientists already discovered during the 2002 SARS outbreak, when palm civets sold in Chinese wet markets were seen as the intermediary link between bats and humans.
"At the start of the Covid pandemic, people worried the distance between Wuhan and the bat virus reservoir was too vast for a natural origin," said Dr. Joel Wertheim, an infectious disease expert and senior co-author of the study. "This paper shows that it isn't unusual."
Additionally, four live animal markets in Wuhan were selling species known to be susceptible to bat viruses in late 2019, placing them at the centre of the initial human outbreak.
Despite the major discovery, it doesn’t completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, which US intelligence agencies have already accepted.
"The most that can be said is that this paper lends weight to the argument that Covid-19 emerged from the wild animal trade, but I can't see how it proves that," added Dr. Simon Clarke, an infectious diseases expert in the UK who was not involved in the study. "After all, we know that the lab in Wuhan was collecting viruses from the wild."
He also confirmed: "This is a top journal and I'd expect the paper to have been rigorously picked to pieces before publication."
