Days after the US and China again took shots at each other over the origin of COVID-19, researchers have published a genetic study with new reasons to think it was distributed by wildlife. The team compared the development of the earlier SARS epidemic, which killed 774 people in 33 countries, to COVID's and found significant parallels, the New York Times reports. "In my mind, they are extraordinarily similar," said Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Edinburgh who was one of the study's authors. They pointed to the travel time the virus requires.
The team analyzed the genomes of the two coronaviruses, along with 248 related coronaviruses in bats and other mammals. Both coronaviruses jumped from bats to wild mammals in southwestern China. When wildlife traders took the infected animals to city markets hundreds of miles away, the virus made the leap to humans. It's highly unlikely the viruses could have traveled to Central China in a few years in bats alone, says the study, which was published Wednesday in Science Direct. The Trump administration's budget proposal released Friday called the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan confirmed, per the Times; China then released a white paper denying that and saying maybe it began in the US.
Earlier studies have said that SARS-CoV-1 probably was carried so far by infected palm civets or raccoon dogs, both of which are traded for their fur and meat. The new study makes the strongest case yet that SARS-CoV-2 reached humans in a similar way, per UC San Diego Today. Another of the study's authors had a caution. "When you sell wildlife in the heart of cities, you're going to have a pandemic every so often," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. (More coronavirus stories.)
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