Written By: Longjam Dineshwori | Published : February 23, 2021 8:49 PM IST
The 'lab leak' theory of coronavirus origin refuted.
The origin of SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, is still a mystery. During the initial days of the pandemic, several theories about the coronavirus' origin surfaced. One of them created a huge controversy and it says that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a bio in Wuhan, China. Even outgoing US President Donald Trump supported this theory. China had vehemently refuted this allegation, and several researchers have also dismissed this theory. A team of experts appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) spent 28 days at the Chinese city of Wuhan to find clues about the origins of COVID-19. Following the completion of the mission, they also refuted the 'lab leak' theory of coronavirus origin. It is "extremely unlikely" that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, said a member of the expert team.
No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found in the blood samples of the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Professor Dominic Dwyer from University of Sydney, who was a member of the WHO expert team tracing the origin of covid-19.
The virus was most likely of animal origin but not necessarily that it emerged at a wet market in Wuhan, he wrote in an article published on The Conversation, Xinhua news agency reported.
"It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal at an unknown location," he was quoted as saying.
The WHO team would be investigating if the virus was circulating in Europe earlier in 2019, Dwyer added.
The deadly coronavirus came from space via a space rock or a meteor, said another theory. This space virus theory was explained in a study paper published in July last year. The researchers analysed the actual origins of two recently emergent epidemics: a fungal disease caused by Candida auris and the current coronavirus epidemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. "These two epidemics display distinctive features and clear evidence that they may have come from a space in-fall of infectious viruses and micro-organisms in cometary dust or meteorite-derived dust particles," the paper said.
The study even linked the current coronavirus epidemic to the meteorite strike seen on October 11, 2019 over Sonjyan City in the Jilin Province of North East China.
A group of Chinese researchers had claimed that the virus originated in India in summer 2019 amid a heatwave that led to a water crisis. In their report entitled 'The Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of Sars-Cov-2 in Human Hosts,' they alleged that the water crisis would have increased the chance of human-wild animal interactions, which then led to transmission of the virus from animals to humans through contaminated water. Then it travelled unnoticed to Wuhan, where it was first identified. However, many experts rubbished the claims, calling them 'flawed.'
According to the WHO expert team, the most likely pathway the virus followed was from a bat to another animal, such as a pangolin or bamboo rat, and then to humans. However, they noted that this would require further research. They also do not dismiss the possibilities of transmission directly from bats to humans or through the trade-in frozen food products.
With inputs from agencies
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