The coronavirus continues to raise many questions among experts. Scientists strive to study it, with the aim of trying to understand much of its nature and, thus, understand why it is so dangerous. However, there are still many unanswered questions about COVID-19, the main one being where it was born and how it was possible to expand so quickly. Now, from China, it assures that it did not arise where it was believed.
It was in the month of January when Europe became aware that a strange virus had appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan and that, as strange pneumonia, it reached people, causing serious physical problems. Experts began to study what it was about and how it had arisen, to reach a conclusion: the first mass contagions had appeared in December 2019 and almost all had one point in common.
After preliminary investigations, experts soon noticed 41 cases in just one week, where 28 of them had a link: they had been in the same time frame at the Huanan market, a wholesale seafood outlet, but also from another type of animals, especially focused on gastronomy. Everything pointed to the fact that, as with SARS, the virus started in an animal to pass on to a human being: its commercialization would have multiplied the number of cases.
Half a year later, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have come to a conclusion: the virus did not start in the Wuhan market, but “is also a victim”, ruling it out as the point of origin for the illness. The market was closed on January 1, and that day, experts collected samples of the animals sold there: now, after completing their tests, they have determined that none contained the virus. What happened then?
According to Gao Fu, director of the CDC of China, none of the samples that were taken tested positive for COVID-19, making it impossible for any animal that was there to infect the buyers. How did they get sick then? Who Patient 0 is is still unknown, but research points to the 55-year – old man from China’s Hubei province as the most likely option, who would have been infected on November 17, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
In recent days, China has released different interviews with those responsible for its most prestigious centres, in which the most hackneyed theories of the virus are discarded. Now it is Gao Fu who denies that the virus started from the market, although it was the point at which someone infected multiplied the contagion among the rest of the people present; A few days ago, it was Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who denied that it had been a laboratory virus.
What does seem confirmed is that the virus is absolutely animal in nature, having taken shape inside a bat. Now, what is sought is that second animal that had infected the human being – in the case of SARS it was a civet, something that has not yet been found after the current investigations. Of course, China completely rules out the Wuhan market as the place where the virus was born. On the contrary, they believe that it is only a “victim” of what happened.