RIGHT SPEAK: Bat Virus Evolution Suggests COVID-19 Virus Emerged Naturally, Spreading To Humans Through Wildlife Trade; New Study Suggests Early COVID-19 Strain Spread From Bats by Wildlife Trade, and other C-Virus related stories

Bat Virus Evolution Suggests COVID-19 Virus Emerged Naturally, Spreading To Humans Through Wildlife Trade:

The results are the strongest evidence to date for a natural zoonotic overspill.

Researchers behind a new study have concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was sparked by wildlife trade in China, similar to the circumstances that led to the SARS outbreak in 2002. The results undermine the widely circulated (and much contested) view that the virus was manufactured in a lab.

The analysis shows that the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originated in Western China or Northern Laos and then left there several years before the disease appeared in humans in central China. This means that the virus traveled up to 2,700 kilometers (1,678 miles) in a pretty short time – too fast for it to be accounted for by natural dispersal via its primary hosts, horseshoe bats.

SARS-CoV-2 is just one strain of a group of respiratory viruses, known as sarbecoviruses, that are mainly hosted by horseshoe bats. This group also includes the viral strain responsible for the 2002 to 2003 SARS outbreak, SARS-CoV-1.

These viruses do not harm the bats themselves, but can transfer to humans, in whom they cause disease, through a process known as “zoonotic spillover”. As we have seen, this can lead to pandemic events, but it is still not completely clear where exactly this transfer occurred or whether animals other than bats were involved.

To find out, Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, and colleagues analyzed the genome sequence data of both SARS-CoV-1 and 2. This allowed them to map the viruses' evolutionary history across Asia prior to their emergence in humans.

This is not an easy process. --->READ MORE HERE

New study suggests early COVID-19 strain spread from bats by wildlife trade:

A recent study from an international team of researchers, including those from UC San Diego’s School of Medicine, gives new credence to the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic spread naturally by way of wild mammal trade, as opposed to a lab leak.

The study, which was published in the science journal Cell on Wednesday, examined the evolution of the COVID-19 virus — SARS-CoV-2 — and compared it to a coronavirus behind an earlier outbreak, the 2002 SARS pandemic.

Using genome sequencing to map the histories of these and more than 250 coronaviruses, the scientists found a number parallels in the evolution of the viruses behind SARS and COVID that suggest the two shared a similar mode of dispersal.

These findings, in their view, dispute the contested theory that COVID originated from a lab leak, even as the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have ratcheted up promotion of supposition in recent months.

The ancestors of both viruses, the study says, had circulated in horseshoe bats across much of China and other countries in southeast Asia for millennia, mutating as it interacted with other coronaviruses inside the cells of its host.

This genetic mixing, which is called recombination, creates new variations of the virus, each more potent until it reaches the point where it can become a human pathogen.

The closest ancestor identified by the study to SARS and COVID reached that tipping point only a few years before it was reported by humans — about one to two years before SARS was first detected in Guangdong Province and five to seven years before COVID emerged in Wuhan.

However, the distance between the origin of this viral ancestor and where the pandemics began was too far to have been carried just by bats. Instead, the study says these viruses spilled over into other wild animals, which were unwittingly carried hundreds of miles by traders. --->READ MORE HERE