It will be increasingly difficult to discover the origins of Sars-Cov-2: a leap of species or a laboratory escape? For the researchers, time is almost up, here are their reasons.
Is it too late to discover the origins of the Coronavirus? Maybe yes, if even the experts start pulling the oars in the boat. After a year and a half of pandemic, Covid-19 has fewer and fewer secrets but it remains a mystery what its spread was.
In a report published in the journal Nature , some scientists and researchers enlisted by the WHO at work for months explain that the process to trace what were the causes ” has stalled “. The window of opportunity to conduct this crucial investigation is closing quickly: any delay will make some of the studies biologically impossible.”
No beating around the bush: understanding whether the virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory or has natural origins, at this point, becomes a climb of Mount Everest. The reason is soon said: China has shown little collaboration in sharing “raw” data which complicated everything, but the fault lies with the WHO, too slow and reluctant to leave the field open to investigations.
Alongside political motivations , there are other exquisitely “technical” ones that cannot wait: the first sick people are cured, the antibodies disappear quickly, the animals are killed, the virus mutates and new variants emerge. Here is the current difficulty of tracing the origins of the virus.
Alongside these, various analyses of what happened to the Wuhan market, tests on a wide range of livestock and published and unpublished viral genomic data were carried out, as well as their link which tried to reconstruct the initial clusters.
In short, despite the research being carried out at 360 degrees, it may not be enough but, at the same time, the experts have stated something that has always been imagined but rarely said openly. “We found the laboratory origin hypothesis too important to ignore, so we brought it into discussions with our Chinese counterparts. And we included it as one of the hypotheses for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in our report.”
Limited time and mandate in Wuhan have put a spoke in the wheel for those who wanted to know more: for this reason, scholars have prioritised understanding the role of laboratories in the early days of the epidemic, general laboratory biosecurity procedures and of potential illnesses and absenteeism of staff due to respiratory diseases at the end of 2019.
Despite the investigations, one question still remains unresolved: how did the leap of species come about? Hence, three other hypothesesin addition to the escape from the laboratory: a direct contagion between man and wildlife; indirect contagion through sick farm animals; through the ingestion of infected meat, probably raw but it is not possible to exclude the frozen one. Based on the Sars experience, in which the virus passed from bats to palm owl before reaching humans, experts continue to believe Covid-19’s passage through an intermediate host as more than likely.
In any case, lots of smoke and little roast. To leave a few glimpses, the team of scientists has planned six priorities : further traceability studies, antibody investigations, trace-back and community surveys, investigations aimed at the risk of possible hosts (i.e. evaluating wild bats or other possible intermediate hosts to discover the passage of Covid to humans), detailed analysis of risk factors and, finally, additional action.
Will all this be enough or will the delay accumulated so far be irreversible to discover the origin of the virus? ” We call upon the scientific community and country leaders to join forces to accelerate the Phase 2 studies detailed here, while there is still time .”
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