What We Know About Covid's Origins

of some of humanity's most feared viruses. Bloomberg Senior editor Jason Gale recently caught up with Hume to hear more about how the stars COVIE two virus got from bats two people. It's been a year since COVID nineteen emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. A lot is being learned in that time, but Hume says questions still remain about the coronavirus origins. What we don't have is it really is much more information about where it's come from.

And understandably, all the focus has been on getting the diagnostics up, getting the human treatment protocols up, but we still don't have much information, at least published, about where this virus may have come from. Humor is part of an international task force set up by the Lancet Medical Journal. He says at least two things have frustrated the research efforts,

international travel restrictions and politics. One of the unfortunate things, and part of it is the circumstance of COVID ninety disease and the inability to travel and shutdowns and stuff like that, is that that investigation hasn't been able to be a collaborative investigation. It hasn't been able to be

an international, um multi institutional kind of global investigation. And as I said, that's in part because of the constraints of the infectivity of the virus, but it's in part alls so because of the what I think is a tragic politicization of the science around this. Humors helped investigate several international disease outbreaks, including the origins of Stars almost

twenty years ago. Back then, a team that included Chinese, American, and Australian scientists work together to trace the virus to bats, and the result was a collaborative and joint body of work and knowledge that was shared and was um you know,

accepted in the scientific community. The problem we have with this politicization of science and almost you know, the conspiracy fairest thing is that the Chinese scientists might well be able to get to the to the bottom of this, and may well have a very plausible identification of both a natural reservoir and a pathway, a conjute, if you like, an epidemiological bridge to human spillover the ongoing challenges, how do we how do we make any findings that Chinese

scientists may already have in this area, and any additional findings that we make, how do we make those broadly accepted to what now seems to be quite a cynical and politicized audience in some sectors of him says, the only way to have the Task Force investigators and their results accepted as being legitimate and credible is if they consider all hypotheses the laws. They need to back up

their theories with strong evidence. So we've got, you know, something like half a dozen hypotheses that start with some version of a bad human transmission, so it might be about human director then goes and spread it somewhere else, or it might be a bad intermediate and etcetera, etcetera. So there are several versions of that poten actual scenario, right down to you know some of the evidently you know less well based conspiracy type approaches about releases and

labor scapes. There are about a dozen people on the team. Kim says that once they've gone over the evidence, they were trying to identify it the most plausible scenario for how the virus entered humans and became efficient at spreading from person to person. This is really about understanding what happened.

He are firstly to do that, to understand what happened here in this context of sas Kobe two and the resulting COVID nineteen, but certainly to understand what that pathway is so we can mitigate it being used again, if you like, by a subject of emerging disease. Him says, scientific thinking around the new coronavirus has changed over the past year. Cases were initially linked to a giant indoor

fresh produce market in Central war Hunt. I just thought the transmission to humans could have come from the animals on sale. Then there's president for this. The original SARS virus in two thousand and two was linked to one of these sites in the southern province of Guangdong. The original reports and the association with the wet market and the parallels of their parent parallels with sas kov One, I think did shape the original perceptions and the original thinking.

More and more people from an epidemiological perspective, including me, are thinking that what we've seen come out over you know, these last nine months in terms of additional info, even though would have been sort of jigsaw piece size stuff with publications, etcetera, does suggest that that one market event may have been more likely an amplification or at least an increase in the efficiency of the virus in human to human transmission. The earliest known COVID nineteen cases in

Uhan were not linked to the market. This means it's possible the virus began infecting humans elsewhere. Jim says it's likely that transmission occurred several times before the virus eventually sparked a global pandemic, As often happens with these emerging diseases. You know, it doesn't necessarily taken. In fact, it typically doesn't take the first time and become very efficient human

to human transmission. You might get one person sick, and you might get one generation of transfer one person or another and it dies out, etcetera. Etcetera. As we better understand that geographic occurrence and the temple account of the earlier cases will clarify that aspect. Scientists think that the virus came from horseshy bats, but they're not the only

animals they can spread it. In Europe and more recently in the United States, it's become clear that mink are highly susceptible to sasko its who This has led to mass cullings of these animals on pelt farms. The mink scenario, to me, says, where you've got a large population of susceptible animals in the right conditions, with a certain density, then this virus is just going to go right through it.

And I also think that gives us some insight into where we need to be going, how we need to be shaping our investigations of the origins of this virus. Him says, they'll need to test wild animals and those raised in captivity for coronavirus antibodies for clues. We need to be identifying potential plausible populations with some kind of trace back if we can from what the earlier cases

might have had contact with. I've already got some clues about the species and locations where related bats or bats with related coronaviruses are, and potentially also at the intermediate post level. Given the viruses affinity for mink, him says it makes sense to screen similar animals like ferrets and weasels. The results might fill in some gaps and help us understand the coronavirus is mysterious journey from bats to humans. And that was Jason Gale in conversation with Hume Field.

And that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one barrows around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is produced by Tophah foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Henriksen and me Laura Carlson. Original music by Leo Sidrian. Our editors are

Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.