Study Links Origin Of COVID-19 Pandemic, Like SARS, To Wildlife Trade

The New York Times (5/7, Zimmer) reports a study published in the journal Cell compared “the evolutionary story of SARS” with COVID-19 some 17 years later. The researchers “analyzed the genomes of the two coronaviruses that caused the pandemics, along with 248 related coronaviruses in bats and other mammals.” In both cases, they argue “a coronavirus jumped from bats to wild mammals in southwestern China. In a short period of time, wildlife traders took the infected animals hundreds of miles to city markets, and the virus wreaked havoc in humans.” The study comes a month after the Trump Administration launched a website “asserting that the pandemic had been caused not by a market spillover but by an accident in a lab in Wuhan, China.” Public health experts fear “the incendiary language” between the US and Chinese governments may “make it difficult for scientists to investigate – and debate – the origin of Covid.”