Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus tormenting the world remains shrouded in mystery.
Most scientists believe it emerged in the wild and jumped from bats to humans, either directly or through another animal. Others theorize it escaped from a Chinese lab.
Last month, Worobey published a COVID-19 timeline linking the first known human case to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were sold. The continuing search for answers has inflamed tensions between the U.S. and China, which has accused the U.S. of making it the scapegoat for the disaster. Some experts fear the pandemic’s origins may never be known.Scientists said in the Cell paper that SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is the ninth documented coronavirus to infect humans. All previous ones originated in animals.
“The gold-standard piece of evidence for an animal origin” would be an infected animal from there, Goldstein said. “But as far as we know, the market was cleared out.” Worobey’s analysis identifies an earlier case: a vendor in the Huanan market who came down with COVID-19 on Dec. 11.Experts worry the same sort of animal-to-human transmission of viruses could spark new pandemics — and worsen this one.
“Around the world, we might have animals potentially incubating these variants even if we get under control in humans,” said David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re probably not going to do a big giraffe immunization program any time soon.”
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