New Reconstruction Points to Animal Origins for Covid-19
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A scientist known for investigating viral origins has reconstructed the first known weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, adding to a growing body of evidence that the virus behind it jumped from infected animals to humans rather than emerging from laboratory research.
In a paper published Thursday in the academic journal Science, Michael Worobey concludes a wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China, where live mammals were sold is very likely to be the site of the origin of the pandemic.
The precise role of the Huanan market in the pandemic has been debated by scientists. Dr. Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who previously unearthed clues about the origins of the 1918 pandemic flu and HIV, showed that most of the known Covid-19 cases in December 2019 had a direct or indirect link to the Huanan market. These infected people worked at the market, visited it, had contact with someone who was there or lived nearby, he found by piecing together genetic data, reports and accounts of early patients.
Among his conclusions are that a man believed to be the first case actually got sick later, when the virus was likely spreading in the community. The man’s case has been used to question the importance of the market because he hadn’t visited it.
The reconstruction suggests that early transmission of the virus was tied to the market, Dr. Worobey said. Most who were at the market and got ill visited a section where live raccoon dogs, which carry coronaviruses, were sold, which “provides strong evidence of a live-animal market origin of the pandemic,” he wrote.
“You can no longer just dismiss the Huanan market link,” Dr. Worobey said.
Dr. Worobey’s work adds to mounting evidence of a natural, or so-called zoonotic, origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. While many virologists and others who study epidemics say a laboratory accident in Wuhan can’t be ruled out, they believe it’s far more likely that the new virus’s origin occurred in nature.
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