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A new analysis of genetic material gathered from a live-animal market in Wuhan in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic strengthens the case that the outbreak originated there when the coronavirus jumped from infected animals to humans, scientists said.
The findings, reported the journal Cell, do not identify any specific infected animal that brought the SARS-CoV-2 virus to a Chinese city inhabited by more than 11 million people. Nor do they definitively prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was Ground Zero for a pandemic that has resulted in more than 7 million deaths.
But the genetic evidence shows the market met the conditions necessary to spark an outbreak and makes it increasingly difficult to explain how the coronavirus could have emerged from a laboratory, a farm or even from another of the city's four live-animal markets, the study authors said.
"It's like if a gorilla virus emerged in San Diego and first hit people who worked at the San Diego Zoo and lived nearby, then spread later more widely," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who worked on the study. "It would not be difficult to reason that it very likely came from the gorillas at the zoo."
The root cause of the pandemic has been hotly debated since its early days. Wuhan is home to a government laboratory where scientists study coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, a fact that prompted politicians, national security experts, late-night talk show hosts and many scientists -- including Worobey -- to question whether the virus had leaked from the lab.
Compelling though the argument may be, hard evidence to support the leak hypothesis has been lacking. Meanwhile, more information has come to light that has persuaded scientists with expertise in relevant fields that the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in animals, just like the viruses that cause SARS, MERS and influenza.
The new results continue that trend, said Dr. Dominic Dwyer, a member of the international task force that investigated the pandemic's origins for the World Health Organization.
"You put all of these origin hypotheses on the table, and then some of them become stronger as you get evidence," said Dwyer, a medical virologist at the University of Sydney and Westmead Hospital in...