The Beginning of COVID-19
By Hafsa
The coronavirus disease (covid-19) was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and was reported to the World Health Organizer (WHO) by Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. Since then this virus has been spreading and dominating many parts of the world, leaving no choice but for the whole world to be put in lockdown. Scientists have combined large-scale data to understand how the covid-19 virus reached the UK and found that 34% of transmission lineages arrived from Spain, 29% from France, 14% from Italy as a result of travel. Although we don't know the exact reason how covid-19 came about, there are 2 main theories that have emerged due to the uncertainty over how people were infected such as: the virus was engineered in a lab in china and the virus came from bats in china's market.
The theory of the virus being engineered in a lab arose after Donald Trump claimed to have evidence that coronavirus started in a lab and that the pathogen was accidently leaked. Accidental releases of pathogens do occur but are very rare and this provides a somewhat legitimate reason to people on how coronavirus was introduced. However majority of scientists who have studied this virus argued that it evolved naturally and crossed into humans from animal species which leads into the second theory, the virus came from bats in china's wet market.
Coronavirus is a virus that can spread from animals to humans and cause diseases such as SARS and MERS. The closest relative to the covid-19 variant is from a bat as scientists have seen similarities between the genome of the virus (SARS-GoV-2) and to that of a bat which is approximately 97% similar. This suggests that bats were a carrier to the virus which transferred into humans. As a result people believe this virus got transferred due to close contact between bats and humans in china's wet market due to the poor conditions of the market. A few viruses have emerged from china's wet markets in the past for example respiratory synchrony and avian influenza; this therefore provides somewhat a reason for people to believe this theory.