New Coronavirus May Not Have Originated in Wuhan: Lancet Report

The coronavirus infection have led to a public health emergency in China. This new and unfamiliar virus has spread at an extremely high speed. According to reports, on Tuesday, January 28, the death toll reached 106, which was 81 till Monday, which means over 20 deaths were reported in a day. Again, the number of infected on Monday was 2,835, which rose to 4,515 till Tuesday, with over 1,500 new infections being reported in a day. These show the exponential infecting rate of the deadly virus. Thirty Chinese cities are in Level 1 Emergency; dozens are under lockdown.

Till now, the consensus regarding the origin of the virus has been that it may have emerged from the seafood market in Wuhan, China. The world science community had concluded that the 2019-nCoV, the name assigned to the coronavirus, originated at Wuhan area. But, a report published in Lancet challenges this hypothesis.

The Lancet paper was co-authored by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions. They have provided details about the first 41 patients to be hospitalised, who were confirmed to have been infected by the virus. According to the report, the earliest case could be dated to December 1, 2019 and this had no link with the seafood market. They also stated that no epidemiological link have been found between the first patient and later cases. The data of the report also shows that 13 out of 41 cases had no link to the seafood marketplace of Wuhan. Georgetown University’s infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey is quoted to have said, “That’s a big number, 13, with no link.”

Lucey also commented, “If the new data is accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were discovered in late December. The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.”

Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist and one among those who analysed the genomic sequence of 2019-nCoV and are trying to decipher its origin, has commented that the December 1 timeline as reported by the Lancet paper is an interesting twist. “The scenario of somebody being infected outside the market and then later bringing it to the market is one of the three scenarios we have considered that is still consistent with the data. It’s entirely plausible given our current data and knowledge. The other two scenarios are that the origin was a group of infected animals or a single animal that came into that marketplace,” he said.

Bin Cao of Capital Medical University and a corresponding author of the Lancet paper said, “Now it seems clear that the seafood market is not the only origin of the virus. But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from.”

In this scenario, the case of the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), a fatal epidemic that broke out in 2012, can be taken into consideration. MERS was also caused by a virus that belonged to the same coronavirus family as that of 2019-nCoV and started in Middle East. But, studies published later on, traced the origin of the MERS coronavirus to Jordan.