According to research, a virus 96 percent identical to the coronavirus causing Covid-19 was found in an abandoned mine in China seven years ago.
The bat-infested copper mine in Mojiang, western China, was home to a coronavirus that left six adult men sick with pneumonia and three of them dead.
The scientists took samples of the bats’ feces, found them on the cave floor, and stored them in a laboratory 1,000 miles away in Wuhan for years while studying them.
And last December, Wuhan became the source of a global coronavirus pandemic that has now infected more than 11 million people and killed 525,000.
That virus, called RaBtCoV / 4991 at the time, now appears to be the closest relative to SARS-Cov-2, which is causing Covid-19, according to a Sunday Times investigation.
But Chinese researchers don’t appear to have been forthcoming about the fact that they found such a similar virus nearly a decade ago in 2012, and especially not because it killed three men when it was discovered.
The virus has reportedly appeared in a single widely available scientific paper, and that doesn’t mention the fact that it had caused fatal pneumonia in humans.
A scientist said the trail of the investigation suggests that Covid-19 may have actually exploded in humans in a rural area of China near Mojiang and then been transported to Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, where it triggered a pandemic. global.
The discovery that something very similar to Covid-19 circulated in bats in Mojiang (half of the bats tested at the mine carried at least one type of coronavirus) has raised questions about the true source of SARS-CoV-2.
The official story has been that the Covid-19 virus jumped from an animal, believed to be a pangolin, to humans at the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan City.
From there, it spread throughout the population in the densely populated city, which is a transportation hub, and then on trains and planes and around the world in a matter of weeks.
But it could have spread to other places first, and even Chinese authorities have since admitted that the market was a ‘victim’ of the epidemic rather than its origin.
Dr. Peter Daszak, a British expert in animal diseases, told The Sunday Times: “It did not emerge on the market, it arose elsewhere.”
He suggested that it was already spreading somewhere around the mine in rural Mojiang and then erupted in Wuhan, which has a population of 11 million people.
“A fair guess is that it was spilled on animals in southern China and then shipped via infected people or animals associated with the trade to Wuhan.”
The RaBtCoV / 4991 virus appears to have caused a disease that sounds extremely similar to Covid-19, and it has a matching genetic code of 96.2%.
The six men who became ill with the virus in 2012 did so after being assigned to the mine to clean bat feces; it is unclear exactly how he infected them.
But the men, who were between 30 and 63 years old, all needed intensive care treatment in the hospital.
They all had high fevers, body aches, and coughs, and five of them were struggling to breathe.
These are all symptoms that match those of Covid-19, and were negative for all tropical diseases that doctors could think of, but two of them tested positive for blood from being infected with SARS or a SARS-like coronavirus. .
The theory is the latest in a long list that suggests the possible origin of the Covid-19 virus, many of which lead to wild bats in China.
Many scientific theories have linked Covid-19 to bats, which commonly carry coronaviruses, and suggest that it passed through another type of animal that was brought to a busy market, possibly a pangolin (stock image of bats).
It is now widely accepted that the virus first started in bats, then infected another animal, such as a pangolin or snake, and transformed into something that could be transmitted to humans.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has now judged that the market in Wuhan was a “victim” of the coronavirus rather than the source of it.
A study of the animals sold there dismisses the theory, they said, after all the animal samples on the market tested negative for Covid-19, meaning they couldn’t have infected the buyers.
“Now it turns out that the market is one of the victims,” Gao Fu, director of the Chinese CDC, told Chinese state media in a radio interview in May.
Colin Carlson, a zoologist at Georgetown University, said the coronavirus outbreak linked to the wet market was likely the site of a ‘super-spreading’ event, where one person transmitted the virus to many other people.
The revelation is likely to fuel speculation that the virus leaked from a Chinese research lab, including United States President Donald Trump, who said he had seen evidence to prove that it started in a virology lab.
However, American and Chinese researchers say there is no evidence to support this theory.
Most of the original 41 cases of COVID-19 reported to the World Health Organization in December were linked to the 116-acre market in Wuhan.
This led to the closure of the wet market on January 1. Most of its 3,600 stores had reopened by April 14, according to reports.
However, scientists at Harvard, MIT and the University of British Columbia examined four samples from the seafood market and found that the traces of the virus were ’99 .9 percent ‘identical to those taken from a Wuhan patient.
This suggests that the virus detected in the samples came from infected visitors or vendors, indicating that ‘Sars-CoV-2 had been imported into the market by humans.’
“Publicly available genetic data does not point to cross-species transmission of the virus on the market,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist, and Shing Zhan, an evolutionary biologist, who participated in the study.
Gao Fu appeared to contradict these findings, and his statement that the market is not responsible for the outbreak, in January in an interview for Chinese state television.
He said the virus had not only been found in people’s bodies, but also in wild meat stalls, prompting him to call for an end to the consumption of wild animals.
The study reinforces research published by a team of Chinese researchers in January, which showed that the first confirmed person to have a coronavirus was likely exposed as early as December 1, showing symptoms on December 8.
The ‘zero patient’, the first person to actually contract COVID-19 in Wuhan, has not been confirmed, but authorities believe it may have been a 55-year-old man from Hubei province infected on November 17.
This suggests that the virus was spreading undetected in the human population around Wuhan for weeks before the ‘super propagator event’ on the market.
“The new coronavirus nullifies much of what people have known and many of its patterns are beyond our cognition,” said George Gao Fu of the Chinese CDC.
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