The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market is located in the central Chinese province of Hubei and has 11 million people. There were rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead and alive, as well as cages holding hog badgers and Siberia weasels. A stall in the southwest corner of the market was selling animals that were stacked in a cage on top of another animal. He stopped to take a picture.

The photo is a key piece of evidence in the effort to find the origin of the coronaviruses. Since the beginning of the Pandemic, it has been suspected that the Wuhan wet market was involved, but it has been difficult to prove it. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biological research lab, is thought to have accidentally unleashed the virus on the city and the world.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that Covid originated in a similar way to the diseases of bats and humans such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Figuring out what happened with Covid-19 could provide a source of information on how to stop the next Pandemic. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that this isn't about blaming anyone. Understanding in as much detail as possible the origins of the Covid-19 epidemic is what this is about.

For the last two years, an international team of scientists including Andersen andHolmes has been trying to find the epicenter of the Pandemic. Their research, which was published in its final form last week, reads like a detective report.

The scene of the crime is the first thing that comes to mind. The city of 11 million people has a virus that jumped from animals to people. The World Health Organization published a report based on a joint investigation with Chinese scientists in the summer of 2021. The researchers obtained coordinates for 155 of the earliest Covid cases in the city by cross-checking different maps and tables in the report.

The west bank of the Yangtze river was the location of most of the cases. The highest density of cases was both very close to the market and very centered on it. If Covid had originated somewhere else, the pattern of cases seen in the early days of the epidemic would not have been so clustered on the market.

Patients who didn't work or shop at the market were more likely to live nearby. "This is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market, but then started to spread into the local community, as vendors went to local shops, infections people who worked in those shops, and then local community members not associated with the market started getting infections," says