TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Scientists across the world are narrowing down the origin of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as evidence showed one virus found in bats to share a similar sequence to 2019-nCoV.
A team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology released a report in bioRxiv on Jan. 23, indicating that 2019-nCoV's sequence was 96.2 percent similar to a bat virus and had 79.5 percent similarity to the coronavirus that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
According to Science, SARS coronavirus has a similarly close relationship to bat viruses, but sequence data showed SARS jumped into people from a coronavirus found in civets. That is one reason why many scientists suspect an "intermediary" host — or several — exist between bats and the 2019-nCoV infecting humans.
Given the currently accessible 2019-nCoV sequences, scientists suggest the coronavirus only jumped into humans very recently. "There's a very large gray area between viruses detected in bats and the virus now isolated in humans," Vincent Munster, a virologist at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Science.
On Jan. 26, the Chinese state-run mouthpiece Xinhua confirmed that 2019-nCoV stemmed from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as previously alleged. The Xinhua report claimed 31 of the 33 positive samples were collected from the western zone of the market, where booths of wildlife trading are concentrated.
However, without accessible scientific reports on this finding, many doubts remain about this conclusion. "The virus might enter humans if there was a batch of recently infected animals sold at different marketplaces," said Trevor Bedford, a bioinformatics specialist at the University of Washington.
Conspiracy theories abound amidst these speculations.
On Jan. 29, Zero Hedge published an article questioning whether Zhou Peng (周平), Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immutation Group at Wuhan Institute of Virology, is the man behind the outbreak. This institution, a level-4 biohazard lab, was allegedly studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens."
Peter Daszak, disease ecologist at EcoHealth, told Science, "Every time there's an emerging disease, a new virus, the same story comes out: This is a spillover or the release of an agent or a bio-engineered virus. It's just a shame. An incredible diversity of viruses exists in wildlife, and within that diversity, there will be some that can infect people and some that cause illness."
