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A British geneticist investigating the origins of the coronavirus says that the pathogen may have started to spread in mid-September and that Wuhan may not be the place where the pandemic started.
Peter Forster of Cambridge University has led a team of researchers trying to trace the source of the virus by mapping its genetic history in an effort to identify the first person infected.
According to Newsweek, Forster and his team have been able to record the spread of the virus, including genetic mutations, as it moved from China to Australia to Europe and the rest of the world.
The Cambridge researchers mapped the genetic history of the infection from December to March and found three distinct but closely related variants: A, B, and C.
A woman stands near the Han River in Wuhan, China on Friday. British scientists say there is a possibility that the coronavirus did not originate in the city.
Dr. Peter Forster of Cambridge University discovered that the coronavirus had three strands: type A, type B, and type C
The genetic history of the coronavirus was mapped from December 24 to March 4, revealing three distinct but closely related variants. Scientists believe the virus may be constantly mutating to overcome different levels of immune system resistance in different populations
Type A is believed to be the closest variant to that found in bats and is believed to be the genome of the original human virus.
This variant was found in Chinese and American patients, although mutated versions of this strain were reported in Australia and the United States.
While Australian authorities struggle to find a cure for the original virus that developed from animals, they are also fighting a mutation known as strain C.
Type A is the most prevalent in Australia, however type C has also been reported in Sydney, according to experts.
Analysis of the strains showed that type A, the original virus that leaped to humans from bats through pangolins, was not the most common in China.
Instead, pandemic ground zero was hit primarily by Type B, which had been in circulation since Christmas Eve.
Type B was also the dominant strain in large parts of the UK and Europe.
According to Forster, type B was also the variant found in most reported infection cases in Wuhan.
Research suggests that there was a “founding event” for Type B in Wuhan.
In biology, a founding event is when a new population is established from a small number of individuals drawn from a large ancestral population.
According to Forster, until January 17, almost all of the coronavirus variants found in Wuhan were type B.
The researchers found that in Guangdong, a province about 500 miles from Wuhan, seven of the 11 samples found in patients were type A.
A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge found evidence suggesting that the coronavirus may have started to spread as early as September. A woman in Maryland (above) tends to the body of a COVID-19 victim at a morgue in Montgomery County on Friday.
Type C was a branch of type B, which mutated from the secondary strain and spread to Europe and Australia through Singapore.
Scientists believe that the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2, is constantly mutating to overcome resistance from the immune system in different populations.
The data collected by Forster and his team indicates that the coronavirus outbreak apparently started sometime between September 13 and December 7.
“This assumes a constant mutation rate, which is unlikely to be the case, and therefore the estimated time may be incorrect,” Forster told Newsweek.
“But it’s the best guess we can make right now, pending analysis of more patient samples stored in hospitals during 2019.”
The published work by the academics, which has been analyzed by scientific colleagues, only tracked samples from 160 patients worldwide, including many of the earliest cases in Europe and the US. USA
The methods used to trace the prehistoric migration of ancient humans were adapted to track the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.
The team has now updated their analysis to include more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 through the end of March to provide a clearer snapshot.
The smallest snapshot, published in the PNAS magazine, initially suggested that Type C was the most common in Europe.
Animal viruses can mutate or combine with other viruses to create new strains that can be transmitted to people.
Scientists say the new coronavirus originated from bats and then spread to humans, possibly through an intermediary animal species.
The broad scientific consensus holds that SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the virus, originated from bats.
Scientists suspect, but have not shown, that the new coronavirus passed to humans from bats via pangolins, a small ant-eating mammal whose scales are highly prized in traditional Chinese medicine.
Some of the earliest infections were found in people who were exposed to the Wuhan seafood market, where bats, snakes, civets, and other wildlife were sold.
China temporarily closed all those markets in January, warning that eating wild animals posed a threat to public health and safety.
The first known case of coronavirus was reported on November 17, when a 55-year-old man from Hubei province, near Wuhan, was diagnosed with COVID-19.
However, experts still don’t know for sure where and how the virus made the leap from animals to humans.
China rejects Trump administration’s coronavirus theory that the pathogen originated in Wuhan’s lab
China is pressing against President Donald Trump and some of his officials, who have flirted in recent days with an atypical theory that the coronavirus was released by a Chinese laboratory that released it.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman on Friday accused the United States administration of trying to change the focus of its own missteps in facing the pandemic by saying a theory that it was started by a laboratory pathogen in Wuhan, the city where the global outbreak occurred. it started.
But that spokesman, Zhao Lijian, has shown that China is not above sowing confusion in the face of the pandemic, either.
He tweeted in March the falsehood that the virus could come from the United States Army.
A scientific consensus is still developing, but the main theory is that the human-to-human infection started at an animal market in Wuhan, likely from an animal that contracted the virus from a bat.
Without the weight of the evidence, Trump and some administration officials are trying to blame China for the illness and death of COVID-19 in the United States.
US officials have raised the possibility that the coronavirus originated within the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan (above)
“Increasingly, we are hearing the story,” says Trump. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo adds: “The simple fact that we don’t know the answers, that China has not shared the answers, I think is very, very revealing.”
On Friday, Pompeo said the United States is pressuring China to allow outside experts to enter the laboratory “so that we can accurately determine where this virus started.”
When Fox Business Network was asked if China could have manipulated the virus for sinister purposes, he said, “It is entirely appropriate for the world to ask the right questions,” then drifted to another topic.
Trump officials have been largely avoiding the unfounded conspiracy theories that the virus was intentionally released by China, even as some weight the unsubstantiated idea that the virus was mistakenly spread by a negligent laboratory in Wuhan.
Experts overwhelmingly say that analysis of the new coronavirus genome rules out the possibility that it was designed by humans, as some commentators have suggested.
It is also unlikely that the virus emerged from a negligent laboratory in Wuhan, they say.
“I would put it on a list of 1,000 different scenarios,” said Nathan Grubaugh of Yale University, who studies the epidemiology of microbial disease.
Still, Pompeo and others point the finger at an institute run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and have done groundbreaking research that tracks the likely origins of the SARS virus, finds new bat viruses, and discovers how they can jump people. .
“We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology exists only a few kilometers from where the wet market was,” Pompeo said.
The institute has an address 8 miles, or 13 kilometers, from the market.
U.S. officials say the U.S. Embassy in Beijing raised concerns about possible security problems at the Wuhan lab in 2018, but emphasized that there is no evidence that the virus originated there nearly two years later.
The episode shows that both world powers, the country where the virus originally spread and the country with the highest number of illnesses and deaths, are willing to use unstable theories and propaganda to divert attention from the problems in their pandemic response.
In a briefing on Friday, Zhao said the United States raised suspicions about the laboratory “simply to confuse the public, divert attention and shirk responsibility.”
President Trump (above) has gone on to blame China and halt US contributions to the World Health Organization, accusing it of criticizing Beijing’s misinformation
He added: “We have said many times that tracing the origin of the virus is a serious scientific problem and requires scientific and professional evaluation.”
However, on March 12, he tweeted: “It could be the US Army that brought the epidemic to Wuhan … Be transparent! Make your data public! You owe us an explanation!
Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in late March that China was pushing hard to manufacture that the virus came from the US. USA, especially its online audiences in Africa.
China withdrew the claim later that month because people were not buying it.
China and the USA USA They wasted crucial time responding to the outbreak.
More than 3,000 people had been infected before the Chinese government told the public what it had concluded six days earlier: that a pandemic is likely to come.
Beijing muffled the early warnings, so the Chinese were assured that the risk of sustained person-to-person transmission was low, even when infected people entered hospitals across the country and the first case was found outside of China, in Thailand.
The United States, which was also slow to take the threat seriously, has delayed other countries amid the pandemic in its response.
Trump did not follow through on his initial promises to have comprehensive evidence, a key factor in containing the disease.
The United States is still struggling to supply hospitals, front-line workers and patients in need in a climate of confusion that turns into chaos.
More than 670,000 people in the US USA They have become ill with COVID-19, not counting large numbers whose diseases are not being reported, and more than 33,000 have died, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
In that context, the pressure for scapegoats is strong.
After weeks of elaborate praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s performance in the pandemic, Trump has resorted to blaming China and halting U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization, accusing it of criticizing Beijing’s misinformation .
In the USA Claims that the virus was created or released in a Chinese laboratory emerged a few weeks after the outbreak began and quickly spread from Internet sites to the general public.
The reality is more mundane, said Dr. Gregory Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
“This virus is a typical bat coronavirus that has developed the ability to infect other mammals, and bats are also mammals,” he said.
“What is becoming evident is that the natural origin of this fits with the transmission dynamics and biology of everything.”
