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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has hardly happened, a new study suggests. Researchers trying to understand when and how the virus first spread in China found that the first person was infected no earlier than October 2019.
But they also made a surprising discovery – that COVID-19 was hardly a pandemic virus. It was only thanks to the conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan that the virus was able to become a global pandemic, the researchers confirmed in the journal Science.
The virus was just lucky, the researchers say. To come to this conclusion, the team used molecular dating, using the rate of mutations currently underway to understand how long the virus has been around.
Also read: Covid-19 vaccination alone will not prevent infection: study
In addition, they used computer models to determine when and how the virus spread. They found that the upper limit of the first instance of the virus was October 2019 and that the virus could not have circulated before that.
Reports from European countries claimed that many people had been infected before October. But according to the results published Thursday, only a dozen people were infected between October and December 2019.
Also read: Cows fed a small amount of algae with 86% less methane: study
In addition, the origins of the virus have been put to rest in the study, which claims the virus emerged in China’s Hubei province and not elsewhere. In 2019, a few rare cases around the world caused a global explosion.
More than 2.7 million people have died from the virus and more than 122 million people have been infected worldwide, with the United States and Brazil remaining the most affected countries.
Even so, the animal source of the virus is still not confirmed. But based on genetic evidence, scientists claim that bats carry a closely related virus, adding that perhaps another species has caught the virus from bats and spread it to humans.
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