Chinese Researchers Dismiss COVID-19 Theory - It Did Not Originate From Wuhan Wet Market

There has been debate over the origins of coronavirus ever since the disease spread across the world causing one of the biggest health calamities in decades.

For a significant time, there has been a consensus of some sort that the virus originated in a wet market in China's Wuhan. It has been believed that the killer virus jumped from animals to humans.

AFP

After staunchly denying the US allegations of coronavirus originating from a bio-lab in its first epicentre Wuhan, Chinese researchers have debunked widely reported view that the deadly virus emanated from a wet market in the city selling live animals.

A leading Chinese virologist, whose mysterious disappearance sparked speculation about the novel coronavirus emanating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), was for the first time interviewed on Tuesday on China's state television where she warned that such viruses are just the "tip of the iceberg" and expressed regret over science being "politicised".

On Wednesday, Chinese scientists dismissed the reports that the deadly virus which struck Wuhan and later turned into a pandemic paralysing the world originated in the seafood market in Wuhan.

NPR

Recent Shanghai-based research targeting local confirmed cases of coronavirus once again proved the attacks on a seafood market in central China's Hubei province for originating the virus are nonsense, state-run Global Times daily reported.

The results of the study, being published on the website of top academic journal Nature on May 20, implied the Huanan Seafood Market in Hubei's capital Wuhan may not be the birthplace of COVID-19, although the virus outbreak emerged in Wuhan had a strong link to contacts with the market.

Based on the analysis of 112 quality samples from 326 confirmed cases reported in Shanghai between January 20 and February 25, researchers found two major lineages (clade I and clade II) with differential exposure history during the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan, it said.

AFP

There has been no direct evidence that the cross-species COVID-19 transmission originally occurred in the Huanan market in Wuhan, although it was a probable place for human-to-human transmission of the virus because of its relatively high crowd density, a researcher of the team, who preferred to be anonymous, told state-run Global Times.

The research team consisted of members from Shanghai's scientific research and medical institutions including the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, Ruijin Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and the Shanghai Institute of Haematology.