A new study explains how the Covid-19 (and not only) did to travel thousands of kilometers, from its place of origin to Wuhan.
The theme of the origins of Covid-19 has tormented us for more than five years now: why has the epidemic broke out in Wuhan, especially considering that the “ancestors” of the virus appeared thousands of km from that city? Over the years, hypotheses of all kinds have emerged, from those that “blamed” the rapid iron bats to the theories that provide for it instead of an escape from a laboratory.
Now a study published on Cell It traces the evolutionary origins of both Covid-19 and of the “first” SARS, exploded in 2002, and exonerates the bats (and laboratory technicians), instead pointing the finger on trade of wild animals.
The origins of the Sarbecovirus. Let’s start from the beginning: both Sars-Cov-1 (the variant that caused the epidemic of 2002) and Sars-Cov-2 are Sarbecovirus, a subgenre of Coronavirus that generally causes respiratory infections. But where do they come from? It is not easy to reconstruct its origins, because when two viruses “meet” in the same guest it can happen that genetic material exchanges, and what comes out is a third different virus from the first two.
The UC team San Diego School of Medicine that conducted the study therefore excluded all recombinant genetic material, focusing only on the regions of their genome that do not make these “exchanges”, and thus managing to reconstruct The evolutionary history of the Sarbecovirus. Who is the first important result of the study, They have been circulating for millennia between Western China and Southeast Asia.
Scagone the bats. The ancestors of the two Sars that we know well, therefore, were born thousands of kilometers away both from the place of the explosion of Sars-Cov-1 and from Wuhan, where Sars-Cov-2 originated. And for all these millennia they spread to the rhythm allowed by their main guests, the horse iron bats. Considering that Sars-Cov-1 appeared in Western China only two years before when he hit the province of Guangdong, and that Sars-Cov-2 was present in Western Laos five years before Wuhan, it is clear that the cause of their diffusion cannot be the bats.
Who is the fault? Easy: of the trade in exotic animals. Both in the case of the first SARS and Covid-19, The virus passed from bats to zibetti and procuose dogstwo species that are often found in open -air markets, where they are sold for both their meat and fur. It is because of this trade that The two viruses they “scrouted a passage” and I walk thousands of kilometers in a few yearsFinally, coming to explode respectively in 2002 and 2020 respectively.
