Their findings confirm earlier work pointing to an intermediate animal host that may have introduced SARSCOV2 to humans. The paper also discusses the possibility that an African swine fever outbreak helped create a situation that gave pathogens more opportunities to jump from animals to humans.

Spyros Lytras is a graduate student at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. He and his coauthors published their perspective piece in the journal Science. In 2005 researchers discovered that horseshoe bats in China were harboring SARSrelated coronaviruses SARSrCoVs.

Experts tied the virus origin to live market animals. They speculated that a SARSrCoV circulating in horseshoe bats seeded the progenitor of SARSCOV in an intermediate animal host.

More than 8000 people contracted SARSCOV before public health measures halted its progress in 2003. The current article kicks off in 2002 discussing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARSCOV which emerged in Foshan Guangdong Province China and spread to 29 other countries.

Virologists hypothesized that a civet cat could have been exposed to a SARSrCoV before capture. An alternative theory suggests a captive civet cat may have contracted the virus from bats foraging in markets. Scientists looked at badgers civet cats and raccoon dogs as possible carriers of the virus. They pinpointed civet cats as the most likely transmitters.

Indeed Wuhan is over 930 miles 1500 kilometers away from Yunnan Province the nearest known site of naturally occurring SARSrCoV collected from horseshoe bats. Further those Yunnancollected viruses were highly divergent from the SARSCOV2 progenitor. In 2019 SARSCOV2 the virus that causes COVID19 appeared in Wuhan city China. Some implicated the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the pandemic.