An Invisible Enemy!

By: Jim Bishay  As the US and the world grapple with the Corona Virus destruction and its ripple effects on the world, many important questions remain unanswered. For the first three months of 2020, the origin story of The COVID-19 virus seemed well fixed: sometime in late 2019 someone at the now well-known Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei province was infected with a virus from an animal.

James Bishay | An Invisible Enemy!

So, scientists went to work in search of its origins. The premise is if they find out where it came from, they are much better positioned to connect the dots, all the way to treatment and vaccination. One of these scientists is Prof. Stephen Turner, head of the department of microbiology at Melbourne’s Monash University. He believes that it is most likely that the virus originated in bats. But of the hypothesis that the virus emerged at the Wuhan live animal market from an interaction between an animal and a human, Turner says: “I don’t think it’s conclusive by any means.”

Countless scientists also ARE looking at the similarities between this novel SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) virus and other coronaviruses like MERS and SARS. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread among people.

This A SARS-CoV-2 virus is a beta-coronavirus, like MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. All three of these viruses have their origins in bats. The sequences from patients suggest a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir. Early on, China suggested that many of the patients at the epicenter of the outbreak had some link to the Huanan seafood market that sells live animals. The Chinese authorities repeatedly said that it is animal-to-person spread. Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets indicating person-to-person spread. Person-to-person spread was subsequently reported outside Hubei and in over 182 other countries including the US.  The consensus is that the virus came from bats but first passed through an intermediary animal such as pangolin, in the same way, that another coronavirus – the 2002 SARS outbreak – moved from horseshoe bats to cat-like civets before infecting humans. 

This discovery, in turn, poses a bigger issue to the larger Chinese narrative of its origin through the wet market. The species of highly suspected bats are not sold at the wet market. Moreover, these bats are some 600 km distant from Wuhan. And some of the early cases of the infections had no connection to the wet market which led many to believe that the Chinese version of the Wuhan market as the original culprit is unlikely.

As a result, scientists, governments, and intelligence agencies all over the world started to turn to the two labs in Wuhan that study bat coronaviruses. The Wuhan Institute of Virology -pictured right- is a high-level biocontamination facility. The world continues to search for the real answers regarding whether the virus was genetically engineered and escaped or leaked, or the result of natural selection in either animals or humans. With 240,000 deaths worldwide, the invisible enemy continues to be of unknown origin!  Written By:  Jim Bishay.

He is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Real News (CRN).

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