How did this virus travel from a bat colony to the city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak was first documented?
t wasn’t greed, or curiosity, that made Li Rusheng grab his shotgun and enter Shitou Cave. It was about survival. During Mao-era collectivization of the early 1970s, food was so scarce in the emerald valleys of southwestern China’s Yunnan province that farmers like Li could expect to eat meat only once a year–if they were lucky. So, craving protein, Li and his friends would sneak into the cave to hunt the creatures they could hear squeaking and fluttering inside: bats.
Dubbed RaTG13, Shi’s virus has a 96.2% similarity with the virus that has claimed some 600,000 lives across the world, including more than 140,000 in the U.S. Shi’s discovery indicates COVID-19 likely originated in bats–as do rabies, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Nipah and many other deadly viruses. The origin of the virus is clearly a touchy subject. Nevertheless, the world desperately needs it broached. Australia and the E.U. have joined Washington’s calls for a thorough investigation into the cause of the outbreak. On May 18, Xi responded to pressure to express support for “global research by scientists on the source and transmission routes of the virus” overseen by the World Health Organization.
Of the first 41 patients hospitalized in Wuhan, 13 had no connection to the marketplace, including the very first recorded case. That doesn’t necessarily excuse the market as the initial point of zoonotic jump, though–we don’t know yet for certain how many COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, but research suggests it could be as high as 80%. And, even if Huanan market wasn’t where the virus first infected humans, it certainly played a huge role as an incubator of transmission. At a Jan.
Still, neither the WHO nor the Five Eyes intelligence network–comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand–has found evidence that COVID-19 originated from Shi’s lab. Canberra has even distanced itself from a U.S.-authored dossier that sought to convince the Australian public that the Five Eyes network had intelligence of a Chinese cover-up. Meanwhile, scientific peers have rallied to defend Shi from suspicion.
On Feb. 24, China announced a permanent ban on wildlife consumption and trade, scratching out an industry that employs 14 million people and is worth $74 billion, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. It’s again extremely sensitive. President Xi is an ardent supporter of TCM and has promoted its use globally.
A trained ambulance team arrived at the man’s home, moved him into a specially designed mobile isolation unit, and drove 20 minutes to Providence Regional. There, the patient couldn’t see who greeted him; everyone assigned to his care was garbed in layers of personal protective equipment. Once in his room, he spoke to medical staff only through a tele-health robot equipped with a screen that displayed their faces, transmitted from just outside the room.
Since the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was published and made publicly available online in January, scientists have mapped the genomes of over 70,000 samples of the virus, from patients in China, the U.S., the E.U., Brazil and South Africa, among others. They deposited those sequences into the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data , a publicly available genetic database created in 2008 initially to store and share influenza genomes.
Meanwhile, genetic surveillance provides real-time data on where the virus is going and how it’s changing. “This is the first time during an outbreak that lots of different researchers and institutes are sharing sequencing data,” says Barbara Bartolini, a virologist at the Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases in Rome, who has sequenced dozens of viral samples from patients in Italy.
Genetic analysis confirmed that on Feb. 26, SARS-CoV-2 had already hit a new milestone, with the first documented case that it had successfully jumped to a new host in Santa Clara, Calif., one with no travel history to the infectious-disease hot spots in China or known contact with anyone who had traveled there.
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