Scientists: Knowing the origin of “Corona” may remain a secret forever
Scientists have warned that knowing the origin of the virus may remain a secret forever, at a time when the Chinese government at home and abroad has been criticized for not sharing information quickly enough with the public and with World Health Organization officials trying to deal with the disease.
Faced with this reality, scientists put forward a set of reasons that may keep the origin of the virus unknown without reaching an answer about its origin or origin, for several reasons, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Political obstacles
From the outset, the search for the origin of the Corona virus was hampered by political obstacles, China postponed the entry of a team led by the World Health Organization to Wuhan last January to investigate the outbreak.
Also, the report issued by the WHO-led team after its visit was criticized by China for raising the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan.
The United States and other countries recently called for a second phase of studies to explore the two main hypotheses that the virus resulted from a leak from a laboratory or transmitted to humans naturally from infected animals.
But politics isn't the only thing standing in the way of getting the answer, according to the paper's report. Scientists who study pathogens that appear to be transmitted from animals to humans don't always agree on how to interpret their findings.
It may take years, if at all, to reach consensus.
“SARS” is an example, and
a group of scientists explained in an interview with the newspaper that the search for the origin of “SARS” and other deadly viruses, for example, gives a clear warning about the multiple challenges that may confuse or impede the quest to know the origin of the Corona virus.
Dr Linfa Wang, a professor in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at Duke-NUS Medical College in Singapore, and an expert in bat viruses explained that SARS began to break out in China, quickly moved around the world infecting and killing people, and disrupting the global economy.
He added that then the same scenario happened as it is now, in terms of suspicion turning to bats as a source of SARS.
He also indicated that the possibility that flying mammals contained SARS-like strains that eventually caused the outbreak was raised at the time.
They are very popular as food in some regions and traditional medicine in China, and bats make up a fifth of all mammals, creating a large and mobile pool of potential disease spreaders.
The bat theory is not new
and in 2017, scientists proposed the theory of the origin of SARS and found bats carrying a coronavirus strain that has the potential to infect humans.
Also, scientists speculated that bats living in the same cave infecting each other with different viral strains, mixing together and eventually creating a SARS-like virus that passed to humans.
But after all the painstaking effort of scientists at the time, this was as close as they could get to finding the origin of the disease, giving an idea of the possibility that the origin of Covid-19 may never happen despite wasted efforts.
It is noteworthy that many theories have spread about the origin of the Corona virus. On the one hand, there are theories that it leaked from the Wuhan Research Institute by mistake, and on the other hand, some theories have been put forward that say that it passed from bats to humans, specifically from Wuhan in China.