Bat or pangolin? The WHO does not know which animal was the one that transmitted the coronavirus

02/09/2021 10:23

• Clarín.com

• World

Updated 02/09/2021 10:44

The World Health Organization (WHO) team of experts stationed in China to investigate the origins of the pandemic concluded that the coronavirus causing COVID-19

is of animal origin

and that "there is no evidence" that it had circulated before from its detection in December 2019 in Wuhan.

However, WHO specialists

could not pinpoint which animal

was the original host of the virus before it jumped to humans.

"The data points to bats, but it is

unlikely that these animals were found in Wuhan,

" explained Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO food safety and animal disease specialist who was at the forefront at a press conference on Tuesday. of the mission.

Peter Ben Embarek presented the WHO findings at a press conference in China.

Photo: AFP

"It is not yet possible to identify the animal intermediary for COVID," said Ben Embarek, before acknowledging that four hypotheses are considered when explaining how the virus jumped to people.

In the first place, the direct jump from an animal to a human;

the second, of the bat and through intermediate animal species,

with a second animal involved

that is "potentially closer to humans in which the virus adapts easily and jumps to humans."

Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese Ministry of Health's COVID-19 expert panel, pointed to bats and pangolins as potential hosts for SARS-CoV-2, but stated that "the viruses identified from these two animals so far

are not the same. similar enough

"to say with certainty that they are the reservoirs.

According to the theories of the research group, the feline family could also be a potential reservoir of the coronavirus given the susceptibility of minks and cats to COVID-19.

A live animal market in Wuhan, similar to the place where the coronavirus causing COVID was first detected.

Photo: AFP

The third theory, which was also supported by Liang Wannian, is the possibility that frozen products act as a transmission surface of the virus to the human population or transmission routes related to food.

The Chinese expert raised this argument to suggest that the virus may have

reached China from other parts of the world

, a fact that Embarek has not completely ruled out either.

Expert word

The team arrived in Wuhan on January 14, considered the epicenter city of the pandemic.

After two weeks of quarantine, he visited places such as the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where

the first known cluster of infections occurred

, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to the conclusions of the team of experts, it is not yet possible to determine how the COVID-19 virus was introduced into the Huanan market, but they assure that it was already circulating in other parts of the city at that time.

A cave in Wuhan where some experts speculate there could have been contacts between people and bats.

Photo: AP

In any case, experts have rejected that it was

circulating through the Chinese city before the end of 2019

.

Ben Embarek acknowledged that the mission

did not produce significant changes

 in the opinion of the WHO on the origins of the coronavirus.

"We came here with two goals: one, to find out what happened at the beginning of the pandemic. We focused on trying to understand what happened during that period. In parallel, we also embarked on trying to understand how it happened, how the virus emerged, how it jumped to the human population. Did we radically change the image we had beforehand? I think not, "he admitted.

However, he pointed out that they added "crucial details" to this explanation.

"We have not found evidence of large outbreaks that could be linked before December in Wuhan. We can also agree that we found a

wider circulation of the virus in Wuhan

in December, not just limited to the Huanan market," he said.

"Our initial findings suggest that the intermediate animal pathway is the most likely and the one that will require more more specific studies," he said, while acknowledging the validity that the virus could have been transmitted via the cold chain.

The origin in a laboratory, an "extremely unlikely" event

In this context, Embarek has argued that it will be necessary to

investigate bat populations

outside of China, since, as stated by the head of the COVID-19 expert panel of the Chinese Ministry of Health, the sampling of bat caves in Wuhan and elsewhere with animals have so far failed to establish a strong enough relationship.

The WHO ruled out that the coronavirus could have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a conspiracy theory that circulated in 2020. Photo: AFP

Taking into account the evidence of the zoonotic origin of the coronavirus, the WHO has

ruled out further investigating

the theory that the COVID-19 virus was originated in the laboratory.

"It is extremely unlikely that it explains the introduction of the virus into the human population and, therefore, it is not a hypothesis that implies future studies to support our work on understanding the origin of the virus," he completed.

Source: agencies

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