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The first cases of the new coronavirus disease, according to initial official reports from Chinese authorities, have spread through the Wuhan Huanan wholesale seafood market.
But after a study of all the animals sold in that market, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week that such a version of the source of the outbreak was rejected.
Gao Fu, head of China’s disease control center, said “it was now clear that the market was one of the victims of the virus.”
Samples from all animals collected from the market were found to be negative after laboratory tests. It seems to indicate that animals cannot infect market visitors.
The Wuhan local government sent the first reports of an unknown pneumonia-like illness to the World Health Organization on December 31. The disease was later related to a new coronavirus.
Most of the first 41 cases were specifically linked to the animal market, which was already closed on January 1.
Considering that the outbreak of the first SARS coronavirus in 2002-2003 also started in a similar market in Guangdong province (the virus then leaped from cats to humans through the civet), it was natural to assume that something similar had happened. this time too.
However, no animal found positive for SARS-CoV-2 on the market, said Colin Carlson, a zoologist at Georgetown University in the United States.
And if the infected animals were not on the market, then they couldn’t be the intermediate hosts that made it easier for the virus to spread to human organisms.
Furthermore, findings from the China Centers for Disease Control that the virus first infected a person outside the Wuhan market are backed by growing research.
The virus appears to have already spread after Wuhan when the first 41 cases are detected and reported. A study published in January showed that the first person to test positive for coronavirus had a new infection on December 1, and her symptoms appeared on December 8.
The authors of the same study also found that of the first 41 cases, 13 were unrelated to the animal market.
Furthermore, a study published in April showed that the virus had already established itself in early January and began to spread actively in the Wuhan community.
The identity of “patient zero” has yet to be established, but it is likely that he is a 55-year-old man who lived in Hubei province, China and became infected on November 17, according to the Chinese publication South China Morning Post. , based on official government documents.
Only the first active distributor on the market?
Carlson noted that the Wuhan animal market may have simply been the site of one of the first “super spreads,” an event in which an ill person infects an unusually large number of people.
Other cases of “super diffusion” around the world could have created outbreaks of this infection, which ignited like a fire in a dry forest. In South Korea, for example, a woman who attended church infected at least 43 people.
And such cases do not necessarily mean that there are people who are more contagious or who release more virus particles into the environment than other infected people. The infected person is more likely to have been in contact with people more than once in an environment conducive to the spread of the virus. And an example of these risky places is the marketplace, where buyers interact closely with each other and with merchants, and the spaces are small.
Probably not from the lab.
One of the most frequently asked questions that scientists already think has been answered, but the conspiracy politicians and theorists continue to ask it again, is whether the virus inadvertently escaped or was deliberately spread from the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, where the Scientists analyzed coronaviruses.
Such a version has been denied not only by the Chinese but also by American scientists. The representatives of the laboratory, which complies with the strict security requirements, affirm that the genome of the new coronavirus has not been registered in their institution and that the laboratory complies with extremely strict security measures.
The institute’s director, Wang Yanyi, told China Central Television last weekend that the new coronavirus is genetically different from any living virus that has been studied at the institute.
Previously, Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the same institute that collects and analyzes Chinese bat coronaviruses, told Scientific American that she compared the genome of the new coronavirus with samples of other bat viruses that she and her colleagues collected and found no matches.
“It was as if a stone had fallen from my chest. Until then, I couldn’t fall asleep for a few weeks, “said the researcher.
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