The chances of finding a COVID-viruses original parent are almost nil according to the experts

A shared ancestor for the bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 revealed by genome recombination

Several years ago, they shared a common ancestor, according to the full genomes of the bat coronaviruses. But the viruses are known to swap chunks of RNA with each other, a process called recombination, so each section has its own evolutionary history. In the latest analysis, presented at the 7th World One Health Congress in Singapore on 8 November, scientists compared fragments of coronavirus genomes. The analysis suggests that some sections of bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 shared a common ancestor as recently as 2016 — just three years before the virus emerged in people in late 2019. The work has not been peer reviewed.

“It’s a clever approach,” says Holmes. “It gives you the purest signal of evolutionary time.” He said that the estimates are less reliable because of the fact that there are only a small number ofRNA nucleotides to compare.

Cosmic Violating Variability Disorder: What the DOE DOE Says about the Wuhan pandemic and Where does the virus come from?

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the US Department of Energy has changed its position on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with “low confidence,” that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The agency was able to conclude that the public doesn’t have access to classified evidence. According to the federal government, “low confidence” means “the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”

There is a study that can’t say whether the animals were infectious with the virus. Some researchers say that the possibility of an animal origin to the pandemic is supported by the fact that the animals were present at the market.

Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE’s “low confident” conclusion doesn’t “negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin.”

It is possible that the site was contaminated with other sources. It is possible that the virus came from someone who has the same symptoms as the afflicted dog, but there is no proof of that.

When the studies were published, NPR talked to the University of Arizona scientist who believes the data may help shift the argument on the lab-leak theory. The key points of the conversation have been edited for clarity.

For example, our new genetic analysis tells us that this virus was not around for very long when the cases occurred at the market. For example, the earliest known patient at the market had an onset of symptoms on Dec. 10, 2019. And we can estimate that at that point in time, there were only about 10 people infected with the virus in the world and probably fewer than 70.

Previous studies have found that Chinese bamboo rats (Rhizomys sinensis) and raccoon dogs were sold at the Huanan market between May 2017 and November 20193, and that several stalls were probably selling live or freshly killed mammals or other meat products4. The data shows that what we thought was there in the market was, according to the co-author of the analysis.

The Chinese CDC leaked a report detailing the results of the environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization’s report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was more than just how many samples a given stall yielded positive results for, it was also information on which stalls had virus in them.

And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

You don’t have a chance of linking the early cases to the site where the outbreak started if you have a virus that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms. The virus will quickly spread to people outside of where it started.

Around half of the COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. The other cases have an even closer geographical association to the market. In our paper we show that.

You have to be aware of the fact that the city has 11 million people. Only one market in the city sells live animals that are prone to the new coronaviruses, such as Raccoon dogs.

Step back and think, “Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?” It could be seen at a market. It could be at a meat packing plant, for example.

I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. It’s interesting. There is an analysis where we show that there is a 1 in 10 million chance that the pattern of cases around the market will occur. [if the market isn’t a source of the virus]. In science, we think that there is strong evidence.

The data that indicates the water pump was poisoning people when they used it is more compelling than the data on the Huanan market. In the mid-19th century a doctor in London, John Snow, helped launch the field of outbreak investigations with his finding of the cause of a cholera outbreak in the city.

Sometimes, you have a moment where you are the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. I felt that way as I discovered that there were more cases in the market than I thought. Those kinds of moments bring a tear to your eye.

The analysis was first reported by The Atlantic on 16 March. It is the first time that the full work has been released publicly, which could pave the way for other studies, such as an investigation of where the animals came from.

The researchers were specifically interested in looking for evidence of mammals, which could have been intermediate hosts of the virus. They identified near-complete mitochondrial DNA sequences — some 16,000-base-pairs long — for five species of wildlife, including raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), Malayan porcupine (Hystrix brachyura), Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis), masked palm civet (Paguma larvata) and hoary bamboo rat (Rhizomys pruinosus). Alex Crits-Christoph is a computational Biologist at a non-profit organization, and is based in Baltimore, Maryland.

“These data do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), at a press event on 17 March, after he had been briefed in advance of the report’s release. “But every piece of data is important in moving us closer to that answer,” he said.

The swabs were originally referred to in a preprint paper by George Gao2, former director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (China CDC) and colleagues, posted on Research Square in February 2022. Researchers have asked for that data to be made public on several occasions, without success.

But Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who is also a co-author on the latest report, discovered the data almost by chance on the public data repository GISAID on 4 March. “Basically, [they’re] the ones we’ve been waiting for, for a year,” she says.

A spokesperson for GISAID told Nature in an e-mail that it does not delete records, but that contributors often update their records, and, during that time, records “become temporarily invisible”. The market-swab data is being updated with newer data as part of a manuscript currently under review. (The Gao paper is marked as ‘under review’ at Nature Portfolio Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher Springer Nature, which publishes Nature Portfolio.)

The authors of the preprint were contacted to collaborate on the analysis, but the China CDC turned them down. She and her colleagues presented their research to the WHO at the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens meeting, which investigated the origins of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome- CoV-2.

At the WHO press briefing on 17 March, Tedros called on the China CDC researchers to be transparent in sharing data. “These data could have and should have been shared three years ago,” he said.

The data was taken for a long time by Débarre but acknowledges the work done by the China CDC. “They did what needed to be done,” she says. “We wouldn’t have this data, if it wasn’t for their work.”

Many more forensic insights could still come from the data if they were made public again, says Crits-Christoph. To determine how recently an animal was present at the market, researchers could look at how long it had been in the environment. There is more that needs to be said about how the samples were collected, processed and sequenced.

A close study of the RNA data could possibly determine whether the animals at the market were sick, adds Crits-Christoph. Does it seem like the creatures were in “a disease state, or a healthy state?” he asks. There are lots of wonderful, complex questions in the data.

Environmental swabs that were negative for the flu have not yet been shared. Those data are important to analyse, to get a better picture of what was happening at the market, says Wertheim.