A vehicle belonging to the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team drives past the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020 — the day that the Wuhan health commission reported what is believed to be the first death from SARS-CoV-2. A new study points to raccoon dogs sold in the market as the likely source of the spillover of the virus from animals to humans.
The results of that sampling would arrive after a delayed and circuitous route – it was posted on a public server briefly and then later publishedinto the hands of Western scientists. When Andersen and his colleagues parsed the genetic sequences of thousands of organisms picked up on those swabs from Stall A, they found the genetic footprint of a host of exotic animals: Masked palm civets, Himalayan marmots, Malayan porcupines as well as raccoon dogs and the viral RNA of SARS-CoV-2.
Worobey says the genetic data, taken at least six weeks after the outbreak is thought to have begun, give a valuable albeit incomplete snapshot of the Huanan market at a crucial moment.A crucial, and imperfect, set of data Experts in Metzl’s camp point to an analysis of the market data by Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle., published last year, found that no particular mammal species correlated with the presence of SARS-CoV 2, as one would expect if, say, raccoon dogs were the main viral reservoir.