PandemicScientists Chasing Origins of COVID-19 Add Southeast Asia to Search
Scientists hunting the origins of the virus behind COVID-19 and clues for how to prevent the next pandemic say a growing body of evidence argues for expanding the search beyond China into Southeast Asia. The pathogen’s closest known relative, sharing some 96% of its genome, is another coronavirus found early last year in the southern province of Yunnan. But a spate of recent studies has found more viruses nearly as similar to SARS-CoV-2 as the one in Yunnan further afield, in Thailand and Cambodia.
Scientists hunting the origins of the virus behind COVID-19 and clues for how to prevent the next pandemic say a growing body of evidence argues for expanding the search beyond China into Southeast Asia.
Since the first confirmed outbreak of COVID-19 put the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan on the world map in December 2019, researchers looking for the source of the virus that causes the disease, SARS-CoV-2, have been training their gaze on China itself.
The pathogen’s closest known relative, sharing some 96% of its genome, is another coronavirus found early last year in the southern province of Yunnan.
But a spate of recent studies has found more viruses nearly as similar to SARS-CoV-2 as the one in Yunnan further afield, in Thailand and Cambodia.
Virologists on a recent mission to Wuhan sponsored by the World Health Organization to trace the roots of COVID-19 also say that the next phase of the hunt should add Southeast Asia to the field.
Their advice is to follow the bats. Some species are well-known reservoirs of the coronavirus family and leading candidates for SARS-CoV-2 fountainhead.
Bat Signals
Scientists have already identified more than 100 SARS-related coronaviruses in bats across China, said Peter Daszak, a virologist who joined the WHO trip.
“But we haven’t done enough work in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam to really say that there aren’t even more in those countries,” he told VOA.
“When you plot out on a map where the bats live that carry these viruses, you start to see that those countries on the southern border of China have even more diversity of bats and likely even more diversity of viruses. So, it may be that the origin really was in Yunnan province, but my best guess is that we need to look in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and then even farther south into the whole region of Southeast Asia as a potential hotspot.”
China has refused to hand over raw data on some of the earliest patients of COVID-19. Even so, Daszak said, the Chinese scientists and WHO delegation agreed that SARS-CoV-2’s most likely route into humans was from bats via some sort of farmed wildlife as intermediary.
Early last year scientists from China and Australia reported finding viruses matching SARS-CoV-2 by more than 90% in Malayan pangolins — a potential intermediary hunted for their scales and meat — that had been smuggled into southern China from Southeast Asia.
