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Sunday, November 29, 2020 16:15 PM (GMT + 7)
As soon as the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had started investigating the origin of Covid-19, other scientific reports appeared to provide different information.
However, one thing that should be made clear is that the question posed here is not about where the virus was detected and officially identified, that is, the city of Wuhan – China, but whether it “originated” in Wuhan or not.
The WHO team of 10 international experts is tasked with finding the answer to this question together with China. However, this process is hampered by the tense relationship between Washington and Beijing. US President Donald Trump repeatedly blamed the virus that it originated in China, while Chinese officials responded with conspiracy theories that the US military brought the virus into the country.
Other groups of scientists were also drawn into the controversy. Specifically, Italian professor Gabriella Sozzi said her team found evidence of antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in blood samples from the national cancer screening test and published the results in November. The antibodies are known to have been present in blood samples from September to 2019, three months before the Wuhan outbreak.
Chinese scientists believe that Covid-19 appeared on many continents before the outbreak of Wuhan. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Now, a study by Chinese scientists also looks at the above problem and suggests that Covid-19 existed on many continents before the Wuhan outbreak. They also theorize that the first human infection may have occurred on the Indian subcontinent.
Dr. Shen Libing of the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences is leading the study. They used phylogenetic analysis to trace the origin of Covid-19. Viruses, like all cells, mutate as they reproduce. This means that small changes occur in your DNA each time they self-replicate. Therefore, strains with less mutation will be closer to the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Shen’s team found several strains with fewer mutations than the one first discovered in Wuhan. “Wuhan cannot be the first site of person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” they concluded. Furthermore, the study found that the least mutated strains were found in eight countries on four continents, including Australia, Bangladesh, Greece, the United States, Russia, Italy, India, and the Czech Republic.
However, other scientists are skeptical of this finding and claim that the research principles and software used for phylogenetic analysis do not meet the expected standards.
Mr David Robertson, an expert from the University of Glasgow (UK), rejected the study and called the Chinese researchers’ hypothesis “very flawed”. “This study does not complement our understanding of Covid-19,” he concluded.
Source: https: //nld.com.vn/thoi-su-quoc-te/trung-quoc-cong-bo-nghien-cuu-bat-ngo-ve-covid-19-20201129104 …
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