A double-vaccinated woman has caught COVID-19 after a lab mouse bit her, say reports.
Taiwan has not seen any community cases of the virus in over a month.
The technician took trains and buses, shopped, and dined out before testing positive despite feeling sick.
A laboratory worker in Taiwan has caught COVID-19 after being bitten by an infected mouse, according to reports.
Taiwan’s health officials are still to establish, without doubt, that she caught the virus as a direct result of the rodent bite, The Guardian reported. Taiwan has not seen any community transmission of COVID-19 for over a month.
“We believe the possibility of infection from the workplace is higher because we have zero confirmed infections in the community,” the health minister, Chen Shih-chung, said, per The Guardian.
As part of experiments at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s leading research institute in Taipei, the rodent was infected with the virus. After being bitten twice by an infected mouse, the double-vaccinated woman tested positive for the Delta variant of COVID-19 on Thursday.
Despite feeling sick, the woman traveled by trains and buses, went shopping, and dined out for several days before testing positive, said The Times.
Yanzhong Huang, a Chinese public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said that should it be confirmed that the Taiwanese researcher did catch COVID-19 due to the rodent bite, then “this will add credibility to the lab leak theory.”
“This case comes as we have reached an impasse on the origins probe for COVID-19, with no progress on establishing whether the outbreak was the result of a natural spillover from animals or a lab leak,” he told The Times.
A cinema in Wuhan is disinfected as the area moved to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic on July 20, 2020.
Getty Images
China is preparing to test thousands of blood samples in Wuhan to uncover the origins of COVID-19.
Up to 200,000 samples spanning 2019 are kept in the Wuhan Blood Center, CNN reported.
Wuhan is thought to have been the location of the first COVID-19 infections in humans.
China is preparing to test thousands of blood samples in Wuhan to uncover the origins of COVID-19, CNN reported on Wednesday.
The city in central China’s Hubei province is thought to have been the location of the first COVID-19 infections in humans, and the World Health Organization in February that the blood samples could help investigators figure out how exactly the pandemic started.
Up to 200,000 samples from 2019 at the Wuhan Blood Center have been kept by Chinese officials in case they are needed as evidence against any lawsuits related to the donations, the report said.
Chinese officials said once the two-year waiting period passes for October and November 2019 – which is when experts think the virus first infected humans – researchers will begin testing the blood samples, CNN reported.
“This provides the closest in the world we’ve seen of real time samples to help us understand the timing of the outbreak event,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN.
The WHO last month announced that it is restarting its investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in China, as competing theories of the disease’s origin remain. Some – including US politicians – have accused China of concealing the cause of the outbreak, claiming COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
Some scientists have said the most likely origin of the disease is natural spillover from animal to human, potentially at a meat market in the area.
Several members of a WHO team that visited China in January had said that Chinese officials refused to hand over key information, like raw patient data from early cases, that could have helped determine when and how COVID-19 started.
“No one will believe any results that China reports unless there are qualified observers at the very least,” Maureen Miller, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University told CNN.
A task force of scientists investigating the origins of COVID-19 has been disbanded by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs.
The Wall Street Journal reported that it was due to the task force’s links with US non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sachs said this risked the perception of bias, according to the outlet.
New York-based EcoHealth Alliance focuses on research and has been subjected to intense scrutiny since the onset of the pandemic. This is due to its long-time alliance with the institute.
Sachs told the Wall Street Journal of his motivation behind dissolving the task force.
“I just didn’t want a task force that was so clearly involved with one of the main issues of this whole search for the origins, which was EcoHealth Alliance,” he said.
There is still no conclusive evidence that coronavirus may have originated from a lab, or that it transferred to humans from a wild animal, or another scientific research experiment.
EcoHealth Alliance has channeled some of its funding towards the institute, which involved collecting samples from bats and people at risk of infection from bat viruses, The Telegraph previously reported.
That grant was stopped in April 2020 on the orders of then president Trump but was reinstated later in the year, the outlet said.
Daszak led the task force, affiliated with the Lancet scientific journal, until he voluntarily withdrew from the role in June. He has insisted there is no evidence to support the lab-leak theory.
Some other members of the task force have worked with Daszak or EcoHealth alliance on projects, the WSJ reported. One member said the disbanded group does not have conflicts of interest that stand in the way of its means to assess data on how the virus jumped to humans.
Sachs told the WSJ that the Lancet COVID-19 Commission would continue to study the origins in a report due to be published in mid-2022. But the commission would widen its scope to include input on biosafety concerns from external experts, including government oversight and transparency on lab research.
He said more labs have the technology to recreate or construct new viruses, but guidance and regulation on safe experimentation aren’t keeping pace.
“A lot is going on around the world that is not properly scrutinized or explained to the public,” Sachs said. The professor isn’t supporting any one theory over another about the origins of COVID-19, he added.
The Lancet task force had been chasing leads on both the natural spillover from an animal and lab-leak hypotheses, WSJ said.
The Chinese city of Wuhan has ordered its entire population of 11 million people to take coronavirus tests after finding three locally-transmitted cases of the Delta variant, Reuters and the Associated Press reported.
“To ensure that everyone in the city is safe, city-wide nucleic acid testing will be quickly launched for all people to fully screen out positive results and asymptomatic infections,” Li Qiang, a Wuhan city official, said Tuesday, according to Reuters.
The three cases recorded on Monday were the first ones that did not come from an outside traveler, Reuters reported. Wuhan, the first epicenter of the global COVID-19 outbreak, had not reported any locally transmitted cases since May 2020.
China reported 90 new cases in total on Monday, the BBC reported. It is unclear how many of those were in Wuhan, aside from the three Delta variant cases.
According to the BBC, this is China’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak in months. It has seen around 300 cases in 10 days, prompting some regions to introduce mass testing and new restrictions.
Rep. Adam Schiff said Wednesday it is “critical” for the US to finish its investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to “avoid any premature or politically-motivated conclusions.”
Schiff’s remarks came in response to President Joe Biden announcing a 90-day deadline for the intelligence community to further probe the veracity of the coronavirus originating from a possible lab leak.
Schiff, who serves as House Intelligence Committee Chair, said in a statement that the Committee was tasked with taking a “deep dive” into what the intelligence community has collected thus far about the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly on “the emergence and spread of COVID-19 from China.”
He said the intelligence community continues to investigate the “two most likely scenarios” for the origins of COVID-19 – natural transmission of the virus from animal to human or a possible lab accident – but the IC “has not reached a community consensus.”
“Beijing’s continued obstruction of a transparent, comprehensive examination of the relevant facts and about the source of the coronavirus can only delay the vital work necessary to help the world better prepare itself before the next potential pandemic,” Schiff said in the statement, adding that the intelligence community will provide relevant updates per Biden’s 90-day deadline.
“It is critical that we allow the IC, and other scientific and medical experts, to objectively weigh and assess all available facts, and to avoid any premature or politically-motivated conclusions,” he continued.
In a press conference Wednesday, Biden revealed he had asked the intelligence community to probe the origins of COVID-19 in March, but the results of the investigation were not extensive enough to conclude either scenario “more likely than the other.”
The investigation launched by the Biden administration came around the same time Biden’s team terminated a Trump-era probe to prove COVID-19 originated in a lab, per a CNN report published Wednesday. A source familiar with the move to shut down the probe, which was started late into Trump’s presidency, told CNN that questions were raised on the legitimacy of the investigation, citing concerns about the quality of its work.
A team of investigators from the World Health Organization said it was “most likely” that the virus emerged from animal to human transmission following a month-long investigation in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus likely originated. But the team could not definitely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, and WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also said in March he does “not believe that this assessment was extensive enough.”
After a month-long investigation in Wuhan, the World Health Organization has offered its best guess as to where the coronavirus came from and how it got into the human population.
A 120-page report released Tuesday lists the virus’ potential origin scenarios in order of their likelihood. At the top is the possibility that the coronavirus jumped from bats to people via an intermediary animal host. But the WHO team, which visited Wuhan from January to February, was in the end unable to pinpoint which population of bats, or which intermediary species, was carrying the virus.
The group did, however, determine that the cross-species hop most likely happened at a farm where wild animals were bred for food in southern China.
“They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs, and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and member of the WHO team, told NPR.
The WHO team thinks that spillover event, as its known, happened in November or even October 2019. China shut down these types of wildlife farms in February 2020, Daszak said.
‘There is a pathway that this virus could’ve taken’
A farmer checks rabbits at his farm in Chongqing, China, January 29, 2021.
Qu Mingbin/VCG via Getty
Daszak said his team found evidence that wildlife farms in China’s Yunnan province and surrounding provinces supplied vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. The first cluster of COVID-19 cases reported in December was linked to that market, which sold live animals and frozen meat.
Two studies published last year found that the new coronavirus shares 96% and 97.1% of its genetic code with coronaviruses seen in Chinese horseshoe bat populations from the Yunnan province, which borders Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
“Animals that we know are coronavirus reservoirs or able to carry coronaviruses came from places where the nearest related viruses are found,” Daszak said Tuesday in a WHO press conference. “There is a pathway that this virus could’ve taken to move 800 to 1,000 miles from the rural parts of south China, southeast Asia, to this market.”
According to the WHO report, possible intermediary host species that may have been raised at these wildlife farms include: minks, pangolins, rabbits, raccoon dogs, and domesticated cats. All of these species can be infected by the new coronavirus. The team is also considering civets, ferret badgers, and weasels as potential hosts, since these animals got infected with the SARS coronavirus and passed it to people in 2002.
A woman carrying mink furs walks at an open air market in China’s Hebei province, November 19, 2020.
Carlos Garcia Rawlins/
Any contact with an infected animal, or with animal products or poop, can allow a virus to jump from animals to people.
But the WHO team didn’t find any infected animals
Daszak’s group took 900 samples from the Huanan market, which closed in early January 2020. They swabbed surfaces, examined animal carcasses, and tested sewage, looking for evidence of the virus. The results showed the surfaces were indeed contaminated with viral particles, but none of the animal carcasses studied – or live animals brought to the site – tested positive.
This suggests that humans, not animals, most likely brought the virus into the market. Indeed, the WHO team concluded the virus had been circulating in Wuhan for a month or more before the outbreak there.
A staff member collects samples for testing from a pangolin at the Jinhua wild animal rescue center in China’s Zhejiang province, June 11, 2020.
CBCGDF/Associated Press
The WHO team also examined more than 80,000 samples from cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs from 31 provinces across China. There wasn’t a single positive case among them. None of the animals had coronavirus-specific antibodies, either, which would have indicated a past infection.
The researchers weren’t able to test animals at wildlife in farms from southern China for evidence of infection, however, so they recommended doing so in a follow-up investigation.
Finding the bat population that first harbored the virus may be easier
A greater horseshoe bat, a relative of the Rhinolophis sinicus species that was the original host of the SARS virus.
De Agostini/Getty
According to Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian with the WHO team, it’s more likely that the team will find the bat population the virus first lived in, rather than the animal that passed it to humans.
“At this point, it may well have disappeared from any intermediate host, so sampling bats, in particular, is probably the most likely to yield results,” Leendertz told Science.
Bats are common virus hosts: Cross-species hops from bat populations also led to the outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and the Nipah virus.
Still, the WHO team tested samples from more than 1,100 bats in the Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, and did not see any viruses closely related to the new coronavirus. That non-finding lends credence to the idea that the virus first jumped to people elsewhere in China.
Daszak is still confident, however, that scientists will eventually find the population of bats that were the coronavirus’ original hosts.
“It would’ve been incredible to have a bat with the exact same lineage of viruses,” he said. “We didn’t see that yet. That will come in the future I think.”
A new World Health Organization report, set to be released on Tuesday, lists the coronavirus’ possible origin scenarios in order of their likelihood.
According to the the Associated Press, which obtained a draft copy of the report, the most likely option is that the coronavirus jumped from bats to people via an intermediary animal host, perhaps at a wildlife farm in China. Next on the likelihood ranking is the possibility that the virus jumped directly from bats to people.
The report is the product of a month-long investigation by an international team that was sent to Wuhan, China, in January to investigate how the virus got into the human population, and from where. The effort, however, yielded few definitive answers.
The WHO team also evaluated less plausible theories, the AP reported, including that the virus might have spread to humans via frozen food products; the report authors deemed this scenario “not likely.” One hypothesis was labeled “extremely unlikely” and all but dismissed: the possibility that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab.
Chinese wildlife farms are a possible origin site
A farmer checks rabbits at his farm on January 29, 2021 in Chongqing, China.
Qu Mingbin/VCG via Getty
The WHO experts behind the report – which the AP got from a diplomat in Geneva, Switzerland – worked together with Chinese scientists during their trip. The WHO team said it got unfettered access to key places in Wuhan over four weeks, including hospitals, laboratories, and the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where officials reported the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases in December 2019.
The group’s conclusion, though far from certain, is that wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely place where the virus made a cross-species hop into humans.
“They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs, and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and member of the WHO team, told NPR. He added that China shut down those wildlife farms in February 2020.
The coronavirus probably came into our population via one of those bred animals, perhaps a pangolin, rabbit, or ferret, according to the WHO. Daszak said his team found evidence that these wildlife farms supplied vendors at the Huanan market.
The virus likely came from bats, and it didn’t leak from a lab
A greater horseshoe bat, a relative of the Rhinolophis sinicus bat species that was the original host of the SARS virus.
De Agostini/Getty
Although the WHO report does not pinpoint exactly where the coronavirus outbreak began, it does offer reasons why it almost certainly did not leak from a lab, as some unsubstantiated theories suggest.
Ideas about a lab leak often point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some scientists were studying various coronaviruses prior to the pandemic. The lab is about 8 miles from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
But the WHO team found no evidence that samples of the new coronavirus existed at the institute, or at any other labs in China, before the pandemic began. The team also spoke with managers and staff at the institute about their safety protocols.
According to Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO scientist specializing in animal disease, it is “very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, pictured on April 17, 2020.
Much more likely, the WHO experts said, is that the virus started circulating in bats first.
A study from February 2020 found that the new coronavirus shares 96% of its genetic code with a coronavirus seen in Chinese bat populations. Then another study revealed an even closer match: a 97.1% similarity to a coronavirus called RmYN02, which was found in bats in China’s Yunnan province between May and October 2019.
Bats are common virus hosts – cross-species hops from bat populations also led to the outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and the Nipah virus.
‘Real concerns about the methodology’
Residents wear masks in Wuhan, February 9, 2021.
Getty
Doubts about the trustworthiness of the WHO report linger, however. The AP revealed in December that the Chinese government was strictly controlling all research into the virus’ origins, while simultaneously promoting theories that it came from outside of China. Mounting evidence also suggests that the virus was circulating in China months before the first cases were reported.
“We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on Thursday. During his confirmation hearing in January, Blinken said he thought China had misled the world about the coronavirus.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he’s reserving judgment about the WHO findings until he can “get a feel for what they had or did not have access to.”
“Once I get that information, I’ll be able to more adequately answer whether I trust it or not,” Fauci said of the report in a White House press briefing on Monday.
The lingering uncertainty leaves a door open for unsubstantiated theories to continue to spread. Robert Redfield, who was head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Donald Trump, recently reiterated one such idea: that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
“Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,” Redfield told CNN on Friday, adding, “I’m allowed to have opinions now.”
Experts from the WHO-China joint team Liang Wannian and Peter Ben Embarek at the WHO-China Joint Study press conference on February 9, 2021 in Wuhan, China.
Zhang Chang/China News Service via Getty Image
An interim report summarizing the WHO investigation into the origins of the virus has been scrapped.
The WHO says this summary will be published with the full report “in coming weeks”.
This comes as the independence of the investigation from Chinese influence has come under scrutiny.
WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said on February 12 that a summary of the results would come within weeks, the Journal said.
But that plan has been scrapped, lead scientist on the investigation team, Peter Ben Embarek, told the Journal.
The results of the WHO-China Joint study are not yet public, the WHO confirmed in an email to Insider on Friday.
Instead, “the team wants to issue the full report at the same time as the summary so all information is available to public”, said spokesman Tarik Jašarević.
This news comes as the independence of the team conducting the investigation has come under fire.
In a letter published on Thursday, 26 scientists not affiliated with the WHO team said that “structural limitations” in how the team operated made a full examination of the origins of the pandemic “all but impossible”.
The scientists said that half of the team is made up of “Chinese citizens whose scientific independence may be limited”.
The investigation has to rely on “information the Chinese authorities chose to share with them”, the scientists said in the letter.
The WHO team arrived in January to Wuhan to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19. It was over a year after the beginning of the outbreak.
After the press conference, one of the scientists on the team said that China had refused to release the raw data to the WHO team, making it more difficult to assess the quality of the information.
Responding to that report, the White House said on February 13 it was “deeply concerned” about the way the early findings were communicated, and called on China to release the data from the earliest days of the outbreak.
“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government”, the statement said.
The WHO told Insider in an email that the full report is “expected in coming weeks”.
As I write, I am in hotel quarantine in Sydney, after returning from Wuhan, China. There, I was the Australian representative on the international World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Much has been said of the politics surrounding the mission to investigate the viral origins of COVID-19. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people.
As part of the mission, we met the man who, on December 8, 2019, was the first confirmed COVID-19 case; he’s since recovered. We met the husband of a doctor who died of COVID-19 and left behind a young child. We met the doctors who worked in the Wuhan hospitals treating those early COVID-19 cases, and learned what happened to them and their colleagues. We witnessed the impact of COVID-19 on many individuals and communities, affected so early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know much about the virus, how it spreads, how to treat COVID-19, or its impacts.
We talked to our Chinese counterparts – scientists, epidemiologists, doctors – over the four weeks the WHO mission was in China. We were in meetings with them for up to 15 hours a day, so we became colleagues, even friends. This allowed us to build respect and trust in a way you couldn’t necessarily do via Zoom or email.
A cyclist rides in front of the closed Huanan market in Wuhan, China on February 9, 2021.
Getty
It was in Wuhan, in central China, that the virus, now called SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019, unleashing the greatest infectious disease outbreak since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.
Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location. Such “zoonotic” diseases have triggered pandemics before. But we are still working to confirm the exact chain of events that led to the current pandemic. Sampling of bats in Hubei province and wildlife across China has revealed no SARS-CoV-2 to date.
We visited the now-closed Wuhan wet market which, in the early days of the pandemic, was blamed as the source of the virus. Some stalls at the market sold “domesticated” wildlife products. These are animals raised for food, such as bamboo rats, civets, and ferret badgers. There is also evidence some domesticated wildlife may be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. However, none of the animal products sampled after the market’s closure tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
We also know not all of those first 174 early COVID-19 cases visited the market, including the man who was diagnosed in December 2019 with the earliest onset date.
However, when we visited the closed market, it’s easy to see how an infection might have spread there. When it was open, there would have been around 10,000 people visiting a day, in close proximity, with poor ventilation and drainage.
There’s also genetic evidence generated during the mission for a transmission cluster there. Viral sequences from several of the market cases were identical, suggesting a transmission cluster. However, there was some diversity in other viral sequences, implying other unknown or unsampled chains of transmission.
A summary of modelling studies of the time to the most recent common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 sequences estimated the start of the pandemic between mid-November and early December. There are also publications suggesting SARS-CoV-2 circulation in various countries earlier than the first case in Wuhan, although these require confirmation.
The market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. So we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins.
Did frozen or refrigerated food play a role?
A woman looks at frozen food in a supermarket in Beijing, China, August 13, 2020.
Thomas Peter/Reuters
Then there was the “cold chain” hypothesis. This is the idea the virus might have originated from elsewhere via the farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration, or freezing of food. Was that food ice cream, fish, wildlife meat? We don’t know. It’s unproven that this triggered the origin of the virus itself. But to what extent did it contribute to its spread? Again, we don’t know.
Several “cold chain” products present in the Wuhan market were not tested for the virus. Environmental sampling in the market showed viral surface contamination. This may indicate the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 through infected people, or contaminated animal products and “cold chain” products. Investigation of “cold chain” products and virus survival at low temperatures is still underway.
It’s extremely unlikely that the virus escaped from a lab
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, pictured on April 17, 2020.
The most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely.
We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health.
We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on – the virus RaTG13 – which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously.
But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture. While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
A team of more than 30 experts
Members of the World Health Organization’s team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic at a press conference in Wuhan, China, on February 9, 2021.
Kyodo News/Getty
When I say “we,” the mission was a joint exercise between the WHO and the Chinese health commission. In all, there were 17 Chinese and 10 international experts, plus seven other experts and support staff from various agencies. We looked at the clinical epidemiology (how COVID-19 spread among people), the molecular epidemiology (the genetic makeup of the virus and its spread), and the role of animals and the environment.
The clinical epidemiology group alone looked at China’s records of 76,000 episodes from more than 200 institutions of anything that could have resembled COVID-19 – such as influenza-like illnesses, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses. They found no clear evidence of substantial circulation of COVID-19 in Wuhan during the latter part of 2019 before the first case.
What’s next?
Our mission to China was only phase one. We are due to publish our official report in the coming weeks. Investigators will also look further afield for data, to investigate evidence the virus was circulating in Europe, for instance, earlier in 2019. Investigators will continue to test wildlife and other animals in the region for signs of the virus. And we’ll continue to learn from our experiences to improve how we investigate the next pandemic.
Irrespective of the origins of the virus, individual people with the disease are at the beginning of the epidemiology data points, sequences, and numbers. The long-term physical and psychological effects – the tragedy and anxiety – will be felt in Wuhan, and elsewhere, for decades to come.
A worker in protective coverings directs members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team on their arrival at the airport in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province on January 14, 2021.
AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
Experts from the WHO and China conducted an investigation into the coronavirus’ origins in Wuhan.
The investigation bolstered findings from studies that suggested the virus was circulating in China and Europe months before officials confirmed the first cases.
One study found that some people in the US had coronavirus antibodies in December 2019.
A growing body of evidence suggests the coronavirus was spreading globally months before the first cases in a Wuhan market captured global attention last December.
The team assessed medical records from more than 230 clinics across Hubei – the province where Wuhan is located – to look for clues. More than 90 patients in the province were hospitalized with pneumonia or coronavirus-like symptoms in October and November 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
This finding lends credence to other research from China that shows people were getting sick in Wuhan in November and early December. One analysis, based on satellite images of Wuhan hospitals and online searches for COVID-19 symptoms in the area, suggested the virus may have started circulating there as early as late summer.
A study from Milan’s National Cancer Institute also found that four of Italy’s coronavirus cases dated back to October 2019. Another study suggests the virus reached the US’ West Coast in December 2019.
Although pinpointing the exact date of the virus’ first jump from animals to people is impossible without more data, these findings suggest the pandemic’s December anniversary is arbitrary.
The virus was spreading in Wuhan before the December
Healthcare workers transport bodies outside a hospital in Wuhan, China, February 5, 2020.
Getty
Wuhan public-health officials initially told the WHO about a mysterious illness that would later be named the novel coronavirus on December 31, 2019.
But government records show China’s first coronavirus case happened on November 17, 2019, according to an investigation by the South China Morning Post.
According to the SCMP, Chinese medical experts pinpointed 60 coronavirus cases from November and December by reanalyzing samples taken from patients seen during that time. That analysis showed that a 55-year-old from Hubei was the first known case of COVID-19 in the world, though the disease hadn’t been identified at that time.
Prior to the January WHO investigation, Chinese authorities worked to sample blood from 92 people in Hubei who were hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms prior to the start of the pandemic.
They sampled blood from two-thirds of those patients that to check for coronavirus-specific antibodies, which would indicate the patients had previously been infected with the virus. All of the samples tested negative for those antibodies, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The remaining one-third of those 92 patients had either died or refused to participate in antibody testing.
The negative results may not mean those people didn’t have COVID-19. Antibody levels do decrease over time, particularly after mild cases. But those patients were also hospitalized, suggesting a more severe illness.
“Antibodies do clear. The levels go down, but less so in cases of severe infection,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist on the WHO team, told the Wall Street Journal. “From what we know about serology, out of 92 cases you would at least have some positives.”
A study from researchers at Harvard University did find more people were visiting Wuhan hospitals in the latter half of 2019. The study authors used satellite imagery of the city to measure traffic to six city hospitals. They saw an uptick starting in August 2019, which peaked six months later. This timeline coincided with an increase in online search traffic for terms like “diarrhea” and “cough.”
The Wuhan market was not the origin of the pandemic
Security personnel wear masks walk in front of a field hospital in Wuhan on April 9, 2020.
Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images
Among the 41 coronavirus cases, Wuhan first reported, many were people who visited or worked at the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
But according to an April report, 13 of the 41 original cases had no link to the market – which suggests the market wasn’t the origin site of the pandemic.
The WHO team confirmed the virus didn’t make its initial jump from animals to humans at the Huanan market. Evidence suggests the virus was circulating elsewhere in Wuhan before the market outbreak happened, Liang Wannian, a member of China’s National Health Commission who assisted with the WHO investigation, said in a press conference Tuesday.
This wet market in Wuhan, China, pictured on January 21, 2020, was linked to one of the earliest coronavirus outbreaks.
Most likely, the market was simply the site of an early superspreader event, with one sick person infecting an atypically large number of others. Superspreader events around the world have created clusters of infections that cropped up almost overnight.
Research suggests the virus was in Italy in the fall of 2019
A COVID-19 patient is transported by nurses inside a biological containment stretcher in the Da Procida Hospital in Salerno, Italy, April 8, 2020.
Ivan Romano/Getty Images
Italy recorded its first official coronavirus case in Lombardy on February 21, 2020. Yet a recent study found coronavirus antibodies in blood samples collected from 23 Italians in September 2019 and 27 in October 2019.
“Our results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 circulated in Italy earlier than the first official COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Lombardy, even long before the first official reports from the Chinese authorities, casting new light on the onset and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors wrote. (SARS-CoV-2 is the clinical name of the virus.)
A study conducted by Rome’s Department of Environment and Health supports that conclusion: Researchers found the coronavirus’ genetic material in sewage samples from Milan and Turin dating back to December 18, 2019.
A man walks past a billboard raising awareness about the new coronavirus that reads “All together, without fear,” in Naples, Italy on March 22, 2020.
Carlo Hermann /AFP/Getty
Spain and France also found clues that the virus was circulating in 2019
In May, doctors at a Paris hospital discovered that patients they’d treated for pneumonia on December 27, 2019, had been sick with COVID-19. France didn’t record its first official case until January 24, however.
People in line for coronavirus tests in Barcelona, Spain, on August 31, 2020.
AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti
In Spain, meanwhile, researchers from the University of Barcelona found evidence of the coronavirus in city sewage samples collected in mid-January 2020, six weeks before the country’s first official case.
Surprisingly, a sewage sample collected on March 12, 2019, also tested positive for traces of the coronavirus. But testing wastewater isn’t a perfect way to detect outbreaks, as Claire Crossan wrote in The Conversation. So it’s possible that the March sample had been contaminated during the study.
By December 2019, the virus had reached the US
Few people wear masks on a pier in Oceanside, California, June 22, 2020.
Research in the US, too, offers evidence that the virus had gone global before humanity even knew it existed.
The US recorded its first coronavirus case on January 20, 2020. But according to one study, the virus had reached the Pacific Northwest at least a month earlier. Blood samples collected by the American Red Cross in nine states, including California, Oregon, and Washington, showed that some Americans had coronavirus antibodies as early as December 13, 2019.
A young resident of Detroit, Michigan, is tested for coronavirus antibodies on April 28, 2020.
REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Antibodies are an imperfect measure of the outbreak since some research suggests our immune systems can create antibodies that recognize the new coronavirus in response to some common colds. Antibody tests can also yield false positives.
Yet in the past, scientists successfully used retrospective antibody studies to trace the origins of SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) – both coronaviruses. Virologists found antibodies specific to SARS in civet cats, and antibodies specific to MERS in camels, which is how they determined those to be each virus’ animal progenitor.
Further examination of blood samples taken in 2019 could be the best way to find out when this pandemic really began.
