A team of researchers in China have released an analysis of the samples that were taken from the Wuhan market in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, local media reported Friday. While it stopped short of providing a definitive answer to the mystery of how the pandemic started, it provides valuable details that could aid Covid-origin studies.
The findings, published in Nature magazine on April 5, are the first peer-reviewed analysis of biological evidence taken from the Wuhan wet market. “First peer-reviewed analysis of the Chinese swabs confirms animal DNA was present in samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2,” the magazine said.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market has been at the centre of theories surrounding the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Experts have been split over whether the pandemic originated in a laboratory or was passed on by wild animals to humans.
This suggests that it’s possible an animal could have been an intermediate host of a virus that spilled over to infect humans. But researchers say the latest findings still fall short of providing definitive proof that SARS-CoV-2 originated from an animal-to-human spillover event,” said the Nature article.
The genomic data published is “one of the most important data sets we’ve had since the emergence of the pandemic”, French evolutionary biologist Florence Débarre told the magazine.
Researchers said that they collected 923 samples from the Hunan market after it was closed on January 1, 2020. From January 18, they collected 457 samples from 18 species of animals, including from “unsold contents of refrigerators and freezers, swabs from stray animals, and the contents of a fish tank” and three live viruses were isolated from these.
The main authors of the study were identified as William J Liu, Peipei Liu, Wenwen Lei, Zhiyuan Jia and Xiaozhou He from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, Weifeng Shi from Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences in Tai’an, and Yun Tan from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) School of Medicine in Shanghai.