A member of the World Health Organization’s investigation team says game farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China closed those game farms in February 2020, says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO delegation who traveled to China this year. Daszak says during the trip, the WHO team found new evidence that these game farms supply animals to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.
Daszak told NPR that the government’s response is a strong signal that the Chinese government believes these farms are the most likely way for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach people in Wuhan.
These game farms, including those in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now.
“They take exotic animals, such as rivets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” says Daszak.
The agency is expected to release the investigation’s findings in the next two weeks. Meanwhile, Daszak gave NPR a highlight of what the team found out.
“China has promoted game farming as a way to alleviate rural population from poverty,” Daszak said. The farms have helped the government achieve ambitious goals to close the gap between rural and urban, as NPR reported last year.
“It was very successful,” says Daszak. “In 2016, they employed 14 million people on game farms, and it was a $ 70 billion industry.”
On February 24, 2020, when the outbreak in Wuhan subsided, the Chinese government made a full survey of the farms.
“What China did then was very important,” Daszak said. “They have issued a statement saying they are going to stop farming game for food.”
The government closed the farms. “They sent the farmers instructions on how to safely dispose of the animals – to bury, kill or burn them – in a way that does not spread disease.”
Why would the government do that? Because, Daszak thinks, these farms could be the flood, where the coronavirus jumped from a bat to another animal and then to humans. “I do think that SARS-CoV-2 people in South China first encountered. It looks like that.”
First, many farms are located in or around a southern province, Yunnan, where virologists have found a bat virus that is 96% genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Second, the farms breed animals that are known to carry coronaviruses, such as civet cats and pangolins.
Finally, during the WTO mission to China, Daszak said the team found new evidence that these farms supply the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.
The market was closed overnight on 31 December 2019, after being linked to cases of what was then described as a mysterious pneumonia-like illness.
“There was definitely a massive transfer on the market,” says Linfa Wang, a virologist studying bat viruses at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. He is also part of the WHO’s investigation team. Wang says Chinese scientists went there after the outbreak in the Huanan market and searched for the virus.
“In the live animals section, they had a lot of positive samples,” says Wang. “They even have two samples from which they can isolate live virus.”
And so Daszak and others in the WHO team believe that the game farms provide a perfect channel between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and a Wuhan animal market.
“China is shutting down the road for a reason,” Daszak said. ‘The reason was that in February 2020 they believed it was the most likely road [for the coronavirus to spread to Wuhan]. And if the WTO report appears, we believe it is also the most likely way to go. ‘
The next step, says Daszak, is to find out specifically which animal carries the virus and on which of the many game farms.
Copyright NPR 2021.