Marie R Culhane

05-Jun-2020ralphcookI wouldn't be so confident about the origin of the disease in wildlife. Yes, certainly bats are involved at some point perhaps decades ago but none of the suggested intermediary wild animals have been proven to have passed the virus to humans. Genetically, all the identified "similar" viruses found in truly wild animals have been too distant from the human version to have been its ancestor. The virus found in "wild" animals sold in the wet markets have conversely been too closely related to be the ancestor. They are quite likely to be the same virus passed to them by their human predators. We know from the second small SARS outbreak in 2004 that the farmed "wild" animals most clearly "implicated in the transmission to a small number of people", almost certainly received the virus from people first. I am more inclined to link events in China, between 2017-2019 to the outbreak of Covid-19, namely the attempts to control African Swine Fever in the national pig herd.