The origin story for the novel coronavirus has always been a bit nebulous. 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 been transmitted from the animals. But the data points between humans and humans in Wuhan were never entirely clear.
Now there is an interruption in the matter. A member of an investigation team from the World Health Organization (WHO) told NPR earlier this week that they believe southern Chinese game farms were probably the source of the outbreak; they noted that the Chinese government closed these farms in February 2020. Although the team’s findings are expected to be announced within the next two weeks, members are now sharing their most important takeaways. They suspect that these game farms were the place where the SARS-CoV-2 virus spilled from one bat to another animal before entering humans.
“They take exotic animals, such as rivets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and breed them in captivity,” said Peter Daszak, who works for EcoHealth Alliance as a disease ecologist and is a member of the WHO team visiting China. this year, told NPR. WHO researchers have discovered new evidence that these game farms are collaborating with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which could explain how an outbreak at the farms would move to the market.
As Daszak pointed out, the Chinese government has promoted farming wildlife as a method of helping rural communities to extricate themselves from poverty. Economically, the strategy worked well, leading to billions of dollars in new investment and millions of jobs for rural Chinese. This made it all the more striking that on 24 February 2020, government officials announced that they would cease game farming for food, even though the outbreak in Wuhan was slowing down.
“They sent instructions to the farmers on how to safely dispose of the animals – to bury, kill or burn them – in a way that does not spread disease,” Daszak explained. His team speculates that it is because they believed the farms were the cause of the virus. “I do think that SARS-CoV-2 people in South China first encountered. It looks like that.”
Another member of the WHO investigation team, virologist Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, reiterated the thoughts.
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“There was definitely massive shipping on the market,” Wang told NPR. He later added: “In the live animals section they had a lot of positive samples. They even have two samples from which they can isolate live virus.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has 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, the available information indicates that the government did much to help other countries when the pandemic began to break out.
‘I have worked very closely with a group of Chinese scientists and doctors who were at the forefront of the outbreak in Wuhan last year, and I can honestly say that the world owes them a debt of gratitude for the way they fought this outbreak. Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, told Salon last month, noting how Chinese scientists sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and posted what they learned, the wrote down initial descriptions of the case and warned that the virus poses a significant danger in person-to-person transmission.
“They raised the alarm about the risk of a global pandemic,” Horton added.
WHO officials believe the definitive details of how the virus first broke out will become clear in the next few years.
“I’m convinced we’ll find out pretty soon,” Daszak told The Wall Street Journal. “Within the next few years, we’ll have really significant data on where it came from and how it came about.”