Five years ago this month, the first patients started arriving in hospitals in Wuhan, China, with a mysterious kind of pneumonia.Covid was described as a “public health emergency of international concern” by the World Health Organization in January 2020. The emergency’s end was declared in 2023. Although people are– and some get very sick – most are advised by the NHS to treat it like other respiratory diseases, such as flu and colds.
We know a lot more about Covid now than we did five years ago, having quickly developed vaccines and treatments. But there are still questions that divide the experts, such as the virus’s origins, its effects, and how we should respond to it. Many of them have implications for future pandemics – so what does the science say?Early on, it seemed clear that the virus had spread from animals to people at a large market in Wuhan. Many of the first people to get infected worked at the market or had links to it. And a few of the market stalls also sold live wild animals, including racoon dogs and palm civets, which are possible animal hosts for this virus. But the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology had been studying other viruses in the coronavirus family for the past decade, raising suspicions this was the real source. Some people have even speculated that this lab deliberately engineered the Covid virus. The last claim has few serious advocates. Virologists have been poring over the genetic sequence of this virus since January 2020; if it weren’t a completely natural virus, it would be obvious. But Covid could have leaked from the Wuhan lab accidentally, for instance, if a worker got infected and passed it on. They might not have even noticed. The market origin theory has more adherents, with the lab leak idea having sometimes been painted as a conspiracy theory. Yet it has some serious proponents, including the head of the FBI. We may never find out the trut
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