Do three new studies add up to proof of COVID-19’s origin in a Wuhan animal market?

  • 📰 NewsfromScience
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 81 sec. here
  • 3 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 36%
  • Publisher: 51%

United States News News

United States United States Latest News,United States United States Headlines

Three new preprints build the case that COVID19 originated at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China.

Three new studies offer one indisputable conclusion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2: Despite the passage of 2 years and the Chinese government’s lack of transparency, data that can shed light on the pandemic’s greatest mystery still exist. And although these new analyses don’t all reach the same conclusion for how COVID-19 was sparked, each undercuts the theory that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, long a focus of suspicions.

Skeptics of the natural origin theory maintain the market cluster could merely be a superspreader event touched off when a person infected with a lab-escaped coronavirus visited it. But Worobey thinks further data could make that contention even less tenable. A more transparent analysis of the market’s genetic sampling data, in particular, might identify exactly which species of animals sold there carried the virus.

Worobey and colleagues had hoped to release their preprints in the next week but sped up their plans, choosing a preprint server that posts without any delays, when the Chinese study was posted on 25 February on the Research Square site.

The coronavirus lineage analysis from Worobey and colleagues refines an argument posited by virologist Robert Garry last year. In data on the early human cases, Garry had identified two different forms of SARS-CoV-2, differing by just two mutations, which he argued surfaced at different Wuhan markets in December 2019. The new work, which includes Garry as a co-author and cites evidence from the Gao study, reshapes that scenario significantly.

He notes that in about 10% of human transmissions of SARS-CoV-2, the virus acquires two mutations, which means a second lineage could have emerged after the infection of the first human rather than two zoonotic jumps. Worobey, Garry, and colleagues did a computer simulation that challenges Bloom’s assertion. They modeled what would have happened if there was an introduction of a single lineage and compared that with the viruses sequenced from Wuhan cases through 23 January 2020.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

please don't break me down i only need 15k dollars Binance erc20:0xf14191ad53d6aa098ffa5109d57f4c490b63d7dd

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 515. in US

United States United States Latest News, United States United States Headlines