Yet Again : Agreeing to Disagree Disagreeably

 

"His [accountant first widely thought the first COVID-19 patient reported his first symptoms December 16] symptom onset came after multiple cases in workers at Huanan Market, making a female seafood vendor there the earliest known case, with illness onset 11 December." 

"It becomes almost impossible to explain that pattern if that epidemic didn't start there."

Mchael Worobey, head, ecology and evolutionary biology, University of Arizona

"It [Woorobey's conclusion] is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree hearsay."

"In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes."

David Reiman, professor of microbiology, Stanford University

"I don't feel like anything can be concluded with high or even really modest confidence about the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, simply because the underlying data are so limited."

Jesse Bloom, computational biologist, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington

Medical staff help a patient walk into the hospital in Wuhan, China, in January 2020 as the pandemic was beginning.   (Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

Another study, this one published in the journal Science reflecting investigative work by Michael Worobey, head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, concludes that by indications newly unearthed, the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 is unlikely to have been the result of a laboratory escapee, as many in the field of virology insist, implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

 

This conclusion based on a new revelation that it was not an accountant with no link to the Wuhan markiet, but a market vendor who was the first COVID case.

 

Based on the mistaken belief that the accountant who was said to have reported his first symptoms appeared in actuality several days later than was initially believed, Dr. Worobey believes that most early symptomatic cases had links to the city's live-animal food market. He pointed at the western section as the locale of transmission where raccoon dogs were caged, believing the new timeline to be indicative of evidence of a live-animal market origin, where a zoonotic transfer took place from animal to human.

 

The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has vexed medical science since the first cases appeared and in short order the virulent pathogen flew across geographic borders to infect the entire globe with utterly disastrous, and ongoing lethal effect, overturning the world social, political and economic order. Its origins' mystery and the manner in which China attempted to suppress news of its presence instead of instantly alerting the World Health Organization which would have led to a global warning, has caused cold-war-like tensions across continents.

 

A closely monitored and impacted joint study by China and the World Health Organization pretty well ruled out the prevailing suspicions that the COVID-19 origins lay in a laboratory located not far from the Wuhan market. The study, studiously managed by China, summed up a collaborative position on the origins as basically unknown, but unlikely to have originated from a lab escapee, to more likely having been transferred naturally via the wildlife trade to humans.

 

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology conduct experiments on corona viruses circulating commonly within bat colonies located in central and southern China. A focus had been concentrated on the laboratory as the locus of the virus which at some point escaped the confines of the high-security laboratory, where experts in the field are convinced an accidental leak from a research lab to be the most likely source of infection.

 

The article by Dr. Worobey and the conclusion drawn was received with skepticism from scientists who believe the quality of the data out of China on early coronavirus infections to be too incomplete to support any conclusion. The mystery of the origins of the dread virus that has robbed the world population of well over five million lives -- while crushing the global economy and changing the world as we know it, likely forever in the general agreement that the virus, now established, will remain a health threat to be dealt with on an ongoing basis -- continues.