China is the only economic power that maintains its zero Covid policy
The origin of the pandemic has always been where it all began: the Huanan wet market in Wuhan.
That's the conclusion
two new studies led by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona,
have come to .
"The geographic clustering of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 and the proximity of positive environmental samples to live animal vendors suggest that the wholesale seafood market was the site of origin of Covid-19," reads the filing of the reports. , for now
preprints,
since they have not yet been published in a scientific journal.
The studies contain
genetic analyzes of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from the first official infected in December 2019
, as well as
geolocation analysis
connecting the samples to the section of the market where wild animals were sold.
"We used the maps from the WHO mission report on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to extract the latitude and longitude of the majority of known cases from Wuhan in December 2019. The Huanan market is located right in the region of highest density. Even when looking only at those cases with no known link to the market, this pattern still appears. This is
a clear indication that community transmission began in the market
," Worobey recounts in a thread he has posted on Twitter to explain his research.
Most of the first reported cases from
the Wuhan market, which remains closed and sealed two years after the first outbreak
, are specifically related to the eastern part of a 50,000-square-meter area where 450 employees worked at 900 stalls.
If one went into the alleys, he found cages with up to 42 types of exotic animals.
Both alive and dead.
origin of animals
From the beginning it has been speculated that the coronavirus had passed to humans through some wild species that was sold in that part of the market.
Many of the animals came from farms in the mountain city of Huangpi, 40 kilometers from Wuhan.
Others came from
the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong, where horseshoe bats originate, considered by most of the scientific community as the main candidates to be the original hosts of SARS-CoV-2
,
although before reaching humans had to go through some intermediate host
.
This is where the market animals appear.
None of
the recent studies presented deciphers the puzzle about which specific animal could have harbored the virus before it was transmitted to humans
.
Another of the authors signing the latest
preprints
, Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, suggests, in statements to the journal
Nature,
that
the culprits could be raccoon dogs.
Last year, a team of researchers from the University of Liverpool presented their results in
Nature
after searching for relationships between 411 strains of coronavirus and 876 species of mammals, including raccoon dogs.
"There could be 30 times more host species than are known to harbor new coronaviruses based on this new virus," the study said.
To name that intermediate host, all the spotlights have always been on the Huanan market
.
The WHO team that spent two weeks investigating in Wuhan asked to make a large inventory of all the creatures that were sold.
One of the experts, zoologist Peter Daszak, said badgers were among the carcasses found in freezers at the market, and while they tested negative, they were capable of carrying the virus, just like rabbits.
"
Live mammals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were present in the Huanan market in the crucial months of November and December 2019.
A surprising finding is a stall that had five highly animal-focused surface-positive environmental samples, including one metal cage in a back room. And it was one of the stalls that we know was selling live mammals illegally. The location of the stalls selling live mammals largely predicted where the positive environmental aspects were located," explains Michael Worobey.
Before the pandemic
The biologist already published at the end of last year in the journal
Science
a chronology of all known SARS-Cov-2 positives before the world knew that a pandemic was beginning.
The WHO noted in its latest report that the first case was that of a 41-year-old accountant who lived 30 kilometers from the market.
But Worobey assured that that first patient actually went to the hospital on December 8, 2019 for dental problems
and that he did not develop symptoms of the coronavirus until December 16.
The dates were confirmed by interviewing the doctors who treated him.
"That many of the more than 100 cases of Covid-19 from December without an identified epidemiological link to the Huanan market lived in its immediate vicinity is remarkable and provides convincing evidence that community transmission began in the market," said the researcher. , which placed a fishmonger who fell ill on December 11 as the first known case of Covid in the world.
But the reality is that the first patient to come out was published
by the Chinese government-controlled newspaper
The Paper : a 57-year-old woman named Wei Guixian.
She ran a shrimp stall in the market
and began showing symptoms on December 10, a day before the fishmonger pointed out by Worobey.
On December 16, Wei was admitted to the hospital for a then "unknown illness."
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