Lab origin of COVID-19 ‘extremely unlikely’, animals likely source: WHO

The World Health Organization on Monday says that it is ‘likely to very likely’ that coronavirus reached humans through an intermediary animal. The report, a joint study by the WHO and China, adds that it is ‘extremely unlikely’ that COVID-19 originated in a lab. 

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The report said that the transmission of coronavirus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario, reports AFP. 

The joint study by China and WHO comes almost two months after an expert team went to Wuhan in January this year. Their hypothesis based on an intermediate host was deemed “likely to extremely likely” in a long-awaited report.

The report was drafted by a team of 17 international experts, appointed by the WHO, and their Chinese counterparts. Delays in publishing the findings of the report had been blamed on coordination and translation issues, even as a diplomatic tug-of-war raged in the background over the report’s contents.

The delays renewed criticism for the WHO’s delayed action in sending a team to probe the origins of the pandemic to China. The team arrived in Wuhan on January 14, over a year after the onset of the pandemic. 

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In 15 months, the virus has spread across the world, killing nearly 2.8 million and plunging the world economy. 

But their highly-anticipated document offered few firm conclusions.

It said evidence suggested the COVID-19 outbreak may have begun several months before it was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019, and called for COVID antibody testing of samples in Wuhan blood banks from as far back as September that year.

They also said it remained unclear what role the Wuhan market had played in sparking or amplifying the initial outbreak, and presented no clear answer on how the virus first jumped to humans.

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They believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease originally came from bats.

One theory examined was that the virus jumped directly from bats to humans. The final report determined that this scenario was “possible to likely”.

A more probable scenario, the report found, was that the virus had first jumped from bats to another animal, which in turn infected humans.

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“Although the closest related viruses have been found in bats, the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link,” the report said.

“The scenario, including introduction through an intermediary host, was considered to be likely to very likely,” it said.