A new study strengthens the theory of the starting point of the pandemic in a market in Wuhan

Thursday published research provides even stronger evidence for the assumption that the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was transferred to humanity from animals that were sold at the Huanan fresh market in the city of Wuhan, China in late 2019.

Cell-tiedejulkaisun The research presented is reported by, among others, the news agency AFP and the news channel CNN.

The study is based on more than 800 samples, which the researchers collected from the surfaces of the market’s stalls and drains in January 2020. At that time, the market was already closed due to the spread of the disease.

Research group member, evolutionary biologist of the French research institute CNRS Florence Debarre explained to AFP that the samples collected in this way do not provide certainty whether the animals sold at the market carried the virus, but the samples confirm that there were wild animals such as raccoons and civets at the market.

“And these animals were in the southwest corner of the market, where by chance a lot of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the Covid-19 disease, was found.”

It’s about animal species that can carry viruses similar to humans. Therefore, they have previously been suspected of acting as a link through which the coronavirus was transferred to humans from bats, where it is known to have originally occurred.

Particularly a lot of coronavirus, researchers found one stall in animal carts, a cage, a garbage cart and a plucking machine. Those samples had more DNA from other mammals than from humans.

The data suggests that the virus has ended up on the surfaces either from the animals in the stall or from a person who was in the exact same place as the animals, who would be one of the earliest unconfirmed infected people.

In previous studies the market has been considered almost certain to be the source of the pandemic, among other things, based on the fact that the first cases of human infection were concentrated in the market and its immediate surroundings.

As an alternative is the strongest theory presented the escape of the virus from a laboratory located in the same city, where viruses carried by animals were studied, but the scientific community has been strongly inclined to the market theory in the past.

The researchers were also able to time the moment of emergence of the virus that caused the pandemic to November–December 2019. Member of the research team, director of infectious disease genomics at the Scripps Research Institute in California Christian Andersen told CNN that if the virus had first escaped from the laboratory and only then spread in the market, the virus that caused the pandemic would have had to have developed earlier than this.