The origin of Covid-19 remains unknown after three years. Laboratory virus or virus of animal origin? So far, no hypothesis has been rejected and little progress has actually been made in identifying the starting point. However, the latest news on the matter seems to reinforce the hypothesis that the Sars-Cov-2 virus, which caused the global pandemic, was of animal origin after genetic material collected from the Chinese market in Wuhan identified the DNA of a species of raccoon showed. (a canid originally from Japan, called ‘raccoon dog’) mixed with the virus.
The data was recently published by China’s Center for Disease Control in the world’s largest public virus database, but deleted almost immediately. However, a French biologist discovered the information by chance and shared it with a group researching the origins of the coronavirus.
These samples will need to be compared to the genetic record of the virus’s evolution to understand which came first.
“These data don’t give a definitive answer to how the pandemic started, but all data is important to bring us closer to the answer,” said World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who also criticized China for had not previously shared the genetic information, saying “this data could and should have been shared three years ago”.
The raccoon dog is bred for its fur and its meat is sold in markets all over China.
The samples were collected in early 2020 from surfaces of a wildlife stall in Wuhan’s Huanan Market, where the first human cases of Covid-19 were found in late 2019.
Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s China office, says the findings are significant, but not definitive.
“They are by far the strongest evidence to support animal origins,” Yip told the Associated Press.
The WHO technical director of Covid-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, warned that the analysis did not find the virus in any animal, nor concrete evidence that it was these animals that infected humans. “This provides clues that help us understand what might have happened,” he said.
Sars-Cov-2’s genetic code is very similar to that of the bat coronavirus, and many scientists suspect it jumped directly from a bat to humans or via an intermediate animal such as pangolins, ferrets or raccoon dogs.
Source: DN
