A new study on the possible origins of the COVID-19 pandemic points back to the Huanan seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Gatekeepers News reports that a scientist, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who has been studying the pandemic from the beginning on Thursday said he has put together a painstaking timeline of all the known cases of SARS-Cov-2 before it became a pandemic.
He discovered that many were in people who lived or worked near the market, the original suspected source of the pandemic, even if they didn’t have direct links to the market.
Worobey, who specializes in tracing the genetic evolution of viruses, has found considerable evidence that the virus arose in an animal, and did not start circulating until the end of 2019.
He said he tasked himself with known cases and found strengthens the theory that the virus originated in animals sold in the market – much like the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 that infected 8,000 people before it was stopped.
One case especially stood out – that of a 41-year-old accountant who allegedly got sick on December 8, 2019 and who had no connection to the market. The case has been cited as evidence the pandemic must not have started at the market.
Worobey found records that showed the man didn’t become ill with Covid-19 until later in December and that his December 8 problem was related to his teeth.
“This is corroborated by hospital records and a scientific paper that reports his COVID-19 onset date as 16 December and date of hospitalization as 22 December,” Worobey wrote in a commentary in the journal Science. That would make a seafood vendor who worked at the market and who got sick December 11, 2019, the earliest documented case, Worobey said.
Other research helped Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market.
“That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market,” he wrote.
“It tells us that there’s a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place that the pandemic started,” Worobey told CNN. “The virus didn’t come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighbourhoods around the market.”
“I wouldn’t call this conclusive evidence, but I would call this pretty darn strong evidence,” Worobey said.
