![]() He has tracked the origins of the 1918 flu, HIV and now SARS-CoV-2. It predicts the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later. And a new genetic analysis estimates the time, within weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occurred. Photographic and genetic data pinpoint a specific stall at the market where the coronavirus likely was transmitted from an animal into people. The new data paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the pandemic. What's more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in the market in late 2019 - such as raccoon dogs and a red fox. Neither of the papers provides the smoking gun - that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.īut they come close. "But they absolutely are pushing it toward an animal origin." "The studies don't exclude other hypotheses entirely," says virologist Jeremy Kamil, who's at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport and was not involved in this research. ![]() In reaction to the papers, they say the data tips the scales toward wildlife sold at the market. Scientists who weren't involved in the research papers have called the new data " very convincing" and a " blow" to the lab-leak theory - that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does research on coronaviruses.
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