Covid-19 and its origins |22 January 2021

It was made public recently that on January 20, 2021, Seychelles hit a record-breaking 81 positive Covid-19 cases in one day. This news takes us back to December 2019, when the first Covid-19 case was recorded.

As we have come to know, Covid-19 originated in Wuhan, China. However some scientists speculate that the virus was present in Italy or Spain earlier in 2019, and that it might have been responsible for a spike in pneumonia cases in France. However, few researchers believe it could have entered Wuhan from Europe.

The virus’ closest relative in nature is the RaTG13 virus, which was discovered in horseshoe bats in southwest China's Yunnan province. The 96.2% genetic match between the two makes it highly likely that Covid-19 also originated in the bat colonies of China's southwest border regions.

The initial cluster of infections was traced back to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, leading many to assume that “patient zero” was probably a trader exposed to contaminated meat products.

But this version of events may be too simplistic to explain the patterns of infection in Wuhan and elsewhere.

Many of the earliest reported cases had no connection with the market. On December 10, 2019, forty-one Wuhan residents were hospitalised with what turned out to be Covid-19, but 13 of them had no link to Huanan.

Scientists also said the virus was unusually “pre-adapted” for rapid human transmission, making it unlikely that the first human contact was made at the seafood market.

Preliminary scientific papers in China identified snakes and mink as potential candidates, and similar coronavirus infections were also found in pangolins illegally trafficked into China.

But some scholars now believe there was no intermediary species at all, and that a SARS-CoV-2 like virus was transmitted directly from bats to humans, possibly on multiple occasions.

The first people infected were likely to be traders in bat meat, or in bat droppings used in traditional Chinese medicine, and one of them could have carried it into the Huanan seafood market, causing the superspreader event that allowed the pandemic to begin.

Then further overseas travelling resulted in the continuous spread of the virus throughout many different countries and throughout the different continents. This resulted in the virus being declared as a “pandemic” and ever since the world has been fighting back against Covid-19.

Compiled by Joshua Marie