How did coronavirus start and where did it come from? Was it really Wuhan’s animal market?

Corona virus lockdown Pic

Corona Virus pic

In the public mind, the origin story of coronavirus seems well fixed: in late 2019 someone at the now world-famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was infected with a virus from an animal.
The rest is part of an awful history still in the making, with Covid-19 spreading from that first cluster in the capital of China’s Hubei province to a pandemic that has killed about 211,000 people so far.
 Stock footage of pangolins – a scaly mammal that looks like an anteater – have made it on to news bulletins, suggesting this animal was the staging post for the virus before it spread to humans.
But there is uncertainty about several aspects of the Covid-19 origin story that scientists are trying hard to unravel, including which species passed it to a human. They’re trying hard because knowing how a pandemic starts is a key to stopping the next one.

Corona virus pic

Corona Virus pic

One animal implicated as an intermediary host between bats and humans is the pangolin. The International Union for Conservation of Nature says they are “the most illegally traded mammal in the world” and are prized for their meat and the claimed medicinal properties of their scales.
As reported in Nature, pangolins were not listed on the inventory of items being sold in Wuhan, although this omission could be deliberate as it’s illegal to sell them.

Corona Virus pic

 Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients in medical journal the Lancet found that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Wuhan market. But the same analysis found that the first known case of the illness did not.

Corona virus Pic

Dr Michelle Baker, an immunologist at CSIRO who studies viruses in bats, says some of the research on Covid-19’s origins have stepped off from what was known from the past.
But “we really don’t know” how accurate the origin story is, she says: “There’s some sort of connection [to the Wuhan market] and there were people exposed to the market that were infected.”