Origins of COVID19

A fruit-eating bat (Artibeus watsonii). Image credit: Stephen Rossiter

I am seeing a ton of new efforts to blame Chinese researchers for the COVID 19 pandemic. Much of this is propaganda. So what is true and what isn’t?

WHO Timeline - COVID-19

What do we know?

1. SARS-COV-2 came out of China.
2. The first infected individuals were identified in Wuhan China (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global).
3. Sequencing of the new virus was done by Chinese researchers

Novel Coronavirus - China

4. The identification that SARS-COV-2 is the infectious agent that causes COVID was made by Chinese researchers (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7).

5. The sequence of SARS-COV-2 is most related to bat coronaviruses (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9).

What don’t we know?