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COVID-19 shows the world needs a better early warning system
It will still be many months before we see the back of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) but, as various vaccines start to work, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet even as the beginning of the end of the pandemic looms, investigations around the world are beginning to raise troubling questions about where and when it all began, and in the process offer clues as to how the world could better defend itself. against the next micro-killer.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus first emerged in Wuhan, central China, in the final days of 2019, or so is widely believed. On January 11, 2020, the day China reported its first death, Beijing made the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus available. Two days later, the first case appeared abroad, in Thailand. By January 21, the virus had reached the United States and, on January 29, the UAE reported the first case in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, as it was named on February 11, was thought to have made the leap from a live animal to a human host in a Wuhan market, but even that “fact” now seems increasingly uncertain. After the market closed on January 1, 336 samples were taken from frozen animal carcasses, and none were positive for SARS-CoV-2. However, of the 842 environmental samples taken at various market sites, including sewer pipes, 61 were positive.
“It is not clear,” says the WHO, “whether the market was a source of contamination or acted as an amplifier of person-to-person transmission, or a combination of those factors.” But the bigger question is whether the coronavirus actually originated in China or whether China, armed with refined detection knowledge during its 2003 battle with severe acute respiratory syndrome, was simply the first country to recognize the new virus.
In November, the WHO quietly launched an investigation to determine exactly where the virus originated and how it spread – complex but vital detective work for the future. Most intriguingly, the team will review CT scans, disease surveillance trends and stored blood samples taken from Wuhan hospitals dating back to before December 2019, looking for evidence that the coronavirus existed prior to its official discovery. But the most explosive conclusion to emerge from the investigation may be that China was “not at fault” after all.
Work to understand where COVID-19 originated will not be limited to China, as the WHO made clear in its terms of reference, published on November 5. “Where an epidemic is first detected does not necessarily reflect where it started,” the document states. “An outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology was identified by surveillance in Wuhan. However, the possibility that the virus has circulated silently elsewhere cannot be ruled out. “
The most explosive conclusion to emerge from the WHO investigation may be that China was not the “culprit” after all.
Jonathan Gornall
Some countries, he added, had retrospectively identified COVID-19 cases as occurring weeks before the first case was officially reported, “and unpublished reports of positive sewage samples could suggest that the virus may have circulated undetected during some time”. This was a reference to an explosive study published in June on medRxiv, an online archive and distribution server for complete but not yet published medical research manuscripts. Spanish researchers reported finding SARS-CoV-2 genomes in archived frozen wastewater samples taken in Barcelona on January 15, 41 days before the first official case in Spain. But the most notable finding was the discovery of genomes in samples taken from another treatment plant on March 12, 2019, more than nine months before the Wuhan outbreak.
Similar dramatic finds have emerged around the world. In May, French scientists concluded that the first COVID-19 patient in France had been infected on December 27, 2019, a month before the country’s first official case was identified. The first case in Italy was registered on February 21, but a search for antibodies to the coronavirus in blood samples taken from 959 healthy volunteers in a lung cancer screening test revealed that the virus was already circulating in the country in September. of 2019.
In the United States, evidence for a ghostly early echo of the disaster that would soon take over the country emerged in a study published Dec. 1 by the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first case in the US was recorded on January 19, but researchers looked for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 7,389 preserved samples taken from blood donors in various states and found antibodies in 106 samples. Some were taken on December 13, 2019.
Public health authorities around the world have much to learn from these findings and the flood of similar studies that are sure to follow.
WHO’s long-term research can determine how, when and where the virus originated, providing epidemiologists with invaluable information on how such viruses spread and how best to contain them. But the real gift of these imaginative studies from Spain, Italy and the US is that they can find blueprints for early warning systems capable of recording the presence of new and future microbial killers before they have a chance to colonize entire populations.
Before 2020, few would have considered it profitable to maintain regular monitoring of water treatment works or samples taken from hospital patients or blood donors, faced with the possibility of detecting a new pathogen. After 2020 and the global trauma of an outbreak that has so far infected more than 73 million people and claimed 1.6 million lives, however, failure to implement such defenses would amount to criminal negligence.
• Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly at The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and now resides in the UK.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect the point of view of Arab News
