Some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. Namely, they say that the market could have just been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the place of the original spillover.
“Analysis-wise, this is excellent work, but it remains open to interpretation,” says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health, in Hamilton, Montana. He says searching for SARS-CoV-2 and antibodies against it in blood samples collected from animals sold at the market, and from people who sold animals at the market, could provide more definitive evidence of COVID-19’s origins.
Researchers speculate that an intermediate animal such as a raccoon dog could have passed the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to humans. Raccoon dogs have been sold at the Huanan market.A research team from China including the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention has now genetically sequenced those positive samples, releasing the results in a preprint posted on 25 February.
“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Ray Yip, an epidemiologist who is a former director of the China branch of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They’ve confirmed that the Huanan market was indeed a very important spreading location.” As soon as the report from China posted online, Andersen and his colleagues rushed to post the manuscripts they had been working on for weeks.
2 studies to flatten the truth.
Thanks nature 💰
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Wuhan market was epicentre of pandemic’s start, studies suggestReport authors say that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 jumped from animals sold at the market into people twice in late 2019 — but some scientists want more definitive evidence. Hmmmmmm 🤔 Does anyone checked Fort Dekrit? 🧐🧐🧐🤔🤔🤔
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