New COVID data links virus origins to animals, but findings not definitive: WHO
Global News
The analysis of the new COVID origins data has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. How the coronavirus first started sickening people remains uncertain.
International scientists who examined previously unavailable genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of COVID-19 were detected in China said they found suggestions the pandemic originated from animals, not a lab.
Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which also has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. How the coronavirus first started sickening people remains uncertain.
“These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Friday press briefing.
He also criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, adding that “this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.”
The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan after the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019.
Tedros said the genetic sequences were uploaded to the world’s biggest public virus database in late January by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; the data have since been removed from the database.
A French biologist spotted the information by chance while scouring the database and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China and looking into the origins of the coronavirus.
Genetic sequencing data showed that some of the samples, which were known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic.
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