THE Covid-19 coronavirus is similar to one detected in bats in China in 2013. But a failure to act on the warnings of those who studied it means we missed an opportunity to protect human health.
While some are now saying the Covid-19 virus passed to humans from pangolins, it is likely that pangolins are merely victims of the infection, like us. 鈥淔rom the virology evidence available to date, the virus is almost certainly from a species of bat,鈥� says Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London.
Advertisement
For years, Zheng-Li Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been isolating coronaviruses from horseshoe bats in caves in China鈥檚 Yunnan province. In 2013, they found that could infect human cells in the lab. Last week, Shi reported that this virus is 96 per cent identical to the Covid-19 virus now spreading in people.
In 2016, Wayne Marasco at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that the virus discovered by Shi鈥檚 team could . They described it as being 鈥減oised for human emergence鈥�. However, they say further research on this virus was hampered by the US government鈥檚 ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous.
Shi鈥檚 work has also revealed that viruses can pass directly from bats to people living near their caves. Her findings suggest we didn鈥檛 need pangolins to catch the Covid-19 virus, just as she previously revealed that SARS can come directly from bats without first infecting civets.
鈥�96%
The similarity between Covid-19 virus and a virus found in 2013鈥�
Last year, Shi warned that it was highly likely coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. 鈥淭he investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs,鈥� she wrote.
Now this opportunity has been missed, Shi has made a plea for .
