The origin story of the coronavirus novel has always been a little hazy. We know that the outbreak started in Wuhan, China; and the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in bats and pangolins in Thailand suggested that the virus may have crossed from these animals. But the data points between animals and a human in Wuhan have never been entirely clear.
Now, there was a pause in the case. A member of the World Health Organization (WHO) investigative team told NPR earlier this week that they believe southern China’s wildlife farms are probably the source of the outbreak; they noted that the Chinese government closed these farms in February 2020. While the team’s findings are due to be released in the next two weeks, members are sharing their main findings now. They suspect that these wildlife farms were the site where the SARS-CoV-2 virus overflowed from a bat to another animal before entering humans.
“They take exotic animals such as civets, hedgehogs, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo mice, and raise them in captivity,” Peter Daszak, who works for the EcoHealth Alliance as a disease ecologist and is a member of the WHO team who visited China this year, he told NPR. WHO investigators found new evidence that these wildlife farms were working with the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, which could explain how an outbreak on the farms would have moved to that market.
As Daszak pointed out, the Chinese government has promoted wildlife agriculture as a method of helping rural communities out of poverty. Economically, the strategy worked well and resulted in billions of dollars in new investments and millions of jobs for rural Chinese. This made it all the more impressive that on February 24, 2020, state officials announced that they would stop growing wild animals for food, although the Wuhan outbreak was subsiding.
“They sent instructions to farmers on how to safely dispose of animals – bury, kill or burn them – in a way that would not spread disease,” explained Daszak. His team speculates that this is because they believed that these farms were the site of the virus’s contamination. “I think SARS-CoV-2 hit people for the first time in southern China. It seems that way.”
Another member of the WHO research team, virologist Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, shared these thoughts.
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“There was a massive broadcast going on in that market, for sure,” Wang told NPR. He later added: “In the live animals section, they had many positive samples. They even have two samples from which they could isolate live viruses.”
The COVID-19 pandemic caused an increase in anti-Chinese sentiment, with President Donald Trump and many of his Republican supporters describing the virus in racist language and blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak. Despite China’s scapegoat, available information suggests that the government did much to help other countries when the pandemic started to break out.
“I worked closely with a group of Chinese scientists and doctors who were at the forefront of the Wuhan outbreak last year and I can honestly say that the world owes them a debt of gratitude for the way they fought this outbreak. It happened.” , Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical magazine “The Lancet”, told Salon last month. He noted how Chinese scientists sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome and posted what they learned, wrote the initial case descriptions and warned that the virus posed a significant danger in terms of person-to-person transmission.
“They raised the alarm about the risk of a global pandemic,” added Horton.
WHO officials believe the definitive details about how the virus first spread will become clear in the years to come.
“I am convinced that we will find out soon,” Daszak told The Wall Street Journal. “In the coming years, we will have really significant data on where it came from and how it came about.”