Why it’s believed COVID-19 could have appeared due to a natural leak in a Chinese lab

Confirmed cases of people with COVID-19 are already over 169 million. There have been more than 3.5 million deaths and the social and economic life of the entire planet has been disrupted by the impact of the pandemic. A year and a half after the health emergency, it is still under debate how the coronavirus which was first detected in pneumonia patients in China was born. The scientific community agrees that the virus was not created on purpose, but it is possible that a natural leak of a coronavirus that was in a laboratory in China has occurred. There are three main questions to answer and prevent future pandemics.

Today the controversy revolves around the origins of the coronavirus at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and revives the claim to determine its origin: does it come from nature or from a laboratory? On May 26, United States President Joe Biden announced that he had called on his country’s intelligence sector “to redouble its efforts to collect and analyze that could bring us closer to a final conclusion ”. Biden requested a report in 90 days.

In addition, some renowned virus experts had called for an open and transparent investigation. “We need to take assumptions about natural and laboratory leaks seriously until we have enough data,” the researchers wrote on May 14 in the journal Science.

The idea of ​​the lab leak again sparked speculation. In a newspaper article The Wall Street Journal on May 23 it was stated that Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with symptoms similar to COVID-19 in November 2019. It is still unclear which illness – among many possible respiratory illnesses – these people had.

March 30, A World Health Organization report previously concluded that the coronavirus, whose scientific name is SARS-CoV-2, likely spread to humans from animals and not from a laboratory. But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that the root cause of the virus is far from over and all hypotheses remain on the table.

There is still uncertainty as to the real origin of the pandemic. There are at least three questions left to explain how the coronavirus affected people and spread around the world:

1. Why does the hypothesis of the coronavirus leak from a laboratory in China persist?

As it is not yet known where the coronavirus came from, countless hypotheses are emerging. At present, most researchers agree that the virus was not created in the laboratory, based on the results of genetic studies. But a plausible hypothesis is that someone accidentally got infected in the lab while working with the coronavirus itself and spread it to other people in the community.

Laboratory accidents have happened in the past, including isolated incidents in which people contracted the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003 and 2004 during its study in China. These incidents occurred after the virus stopped spreading in communities around the world and the epidemic has largely ended.

There is a story in which coronaviruses have made the leap from animals to humans on several occasions over the past two decades. The SARS virus has spread to people from civets infected with bat coronavirus. Civets are carnivorous mammals widely distributed throughout India, southern China and Indochina.

The MERS virus continues to spread to people in the Middle East from camels. Additionally, three Haitian children were infected with swine coronavirus in 2014 and 2015, researchers reported in a preliminary study in March. And a recent study by Clinical infectious diseases reported that eight people in Malaysia were infected in 2017 and 2018 with a coronavirus similar to that found in dogs.

These latest two findings are signs that coronaviruses can strike people more often than previously thought. It just wasn’t getting that much attention. Researchers have also found fragments of coronavirus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in bats native to Southeast Asia, but nothing has yet been discovered.

2. What tests are needed to prove the origin of the virus?

Finding a virus almost identical to SARS-CoV-2 in a wild animal – whether bats or other animals – would go a long way in showing that the virus comes from nature. But it is a difficult quest that can take years. And there is a chance it will never be found.

The Ebola virus probably originates from bats, for example. However, while researchers have found fragments of the virus in bats, they have never found the complete genetic model of a bat Ebola virus that is a close relative of the one that caused an outbreak in bats. the man. This, despite decades of research.

When it comes to testing for a lab leak, experts ask public health agencies and research labs to make their records public. These records could help determine if someone who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had ever been ill with COVID-19.

The WHO report says all workers tested negative for antibodies. But team members did not have full access to the data. Laboratory data would also show whether the viruses studied in the laboratory were identical to SARS-CoV-2.

One of the institute’s leading scientists said no such virus was found in its records. But the truth is that now members of the WHO team did not have access to the archives.

3- Why is it important for humanity to know the origin of the coronavirus?

Knowing the origin of the coronavirus will be a step in preventing large epidemics from recurring. This is true regardless of where the virus comes from. Whether the outbreak occurred in nature or after a laboratory accident, it is likely that the virus originally came from an animal, as laboratories often collect viruses from nature for study.

Clarifying what the threat to animals is means researchers could monitor high-risk animals or people for early warning. Experts around the world – for example – are monitoring the influenza virus in poultry. This was decided years ago because ducks and chickens can be sources of bird flu, which can be fatal to humans. And the biosecurity of institutions conducting research on viruses should also be enhanced. Research institutes will need to continue to closely monitor laboratory facilities to ensure that the environment is as safe as possible for people handling potentially fatal viruses.

Not knowing how the pandemic started puts the world at risk of future epidemics, said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, in a television appearance. “There will be COVID-26 and COVID-32 unless we fully understand the origins of COVID-19,” Hotez said on NBC’s Meet the press.

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