More evidence that covid-19 started in a market, not a laboratory
Two new papers make the case robustly
TWO NEW papers provide more robust answers than heretofore available to three of the outstanding questions of the covid-19 pandemic: how, when and where SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused it, first appeared in human beings. These papers, so-called preprints (meaning they have not yet gone through the formal process of peer review that precedes publication in a journal) were written by related teams of researchers from institutions around the world and posted to Zenodo, a repository for such documents. They conclude that, by November 2019, the virus was present in animals on sale at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan (pictured), whence it jumped to human hosts on two separate occasions a week or so apart.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Origin stories”
From the March 5th 2022 edition
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