At some point in late 2019, an outbreak of a novel SARS-like coronavirus was detected in Wuhan and reached the level of a global contagion. Where did it come from?
Did it spill over naturally from a bat to humans? Did it originate in a wet market in Wuhan? Or is there any truth in the “conspiracy theory” that the virus slipped out of a laboratory in Wuhan where active research on SARS-like coronavirus was being conducted? Or, the thorniest question of all, could it have been genetically modified or tinkered with? In recent months, the debate has been reignited.
What really happened? At this stage it seems that nobody knows for sure. Very little is known about the beginnings of the pandemic, but everything indicates that the first outbreak of the virus appeared in Wuhan. The trillion-dollar question is: how did it get to Wuhan?
There are multiple paths it could have taken, and to explain the turn of events, two theories have emerged. One school of thought assumes it is a natural zoonotic event. The other school of thought assumes that it escaped from a nearby research laboratory that studies and works with exactly this kind of coronavirus. (Some opine that it was a bioweapon, and purposefully released—but I don’t think that any reasonable person espouses this belief. Equally absurd is China’s favourite theory that the virus SARS-CoV-2 reached China on frozen goods from abroad.)
As for the first theory, there are a range of possibilities including a zoonotic jump from bats to humans, either directly or via an intermediate host. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. This is what happened with SARS and MERS. However, with SARS and MERS, scientists were able to determine rather quickly which animal species had carried the virus from bats to humans.
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