The controversial Wuhan lab has added another branch to the bat coronavirus family tree: “This is the tip of the iceberg.”

Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, identified as a possible accidental source of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported the discovery of a new branch in the bat coronavirus family tree.

The virus are linked to the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, although less directly than other known viruses. However, they have high levels of similarity in certain areas of the genome, the researchers said in an article published in Friday. bioRvix.

The lab released the data after several years of research, started in 2015 in Yunnan province, where they collected more than 1,000 bat samples in and around a mining cave for more than 30 months.

“These results suggest that [coronavirus] What we discovered about bats may just be the tip of the iceberg “, wrote the team in the article posted on the bioRvix server, highlighted the portal Morning Message from South China.

In November, they had reported in Nature that in the scans, they found nine viruses belonging to a category shared with the viruses responsible for SARS and COVID-19. One of these variants, known as RaTG13, was described in a February article and is the coronavirus closest to the cause of COVID-19.

China’s reaction

Xi Jinping’s regime has denied that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with a disease requiring hospital treatment before the virus spread around the world.

Claiming to be based on a US intelligence report the Wall Street newspaper He stressed that three researchers from the Chinese laboratory had been affected since November 2019 by “symptoms compatible both with those of Covid-19 and of a seasonal infection”.

Asked about this, a spokesman for Chinese diplomacy, Zhao Lijian, on Monday called the statements of the American newspaper completely false. “On March 23, the Wuhan Institute of Virology released a statement indicating that prior to December 30, 2019, he had not been in contact with the coronavirus. To this date [de publicación del comunicado], no staff member or student researcher has been infected “with the virus, the spokesperson said.

China revealed to the World Health Organization (WHO) on December 31, 2019, the existence of an outbreak of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. And the Chinese government has always fought the theory that Covid-19 could have escaped from one of its labs.

After a four-week stay in Wuhan earlier this year, a joint study by WHO and Chinese experts in March found a laboratory incident “highly unlikely”, but then the organization ordered a further investigation.

(With information from AFP)

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