China takes another U-turn, says coronavirus had ‘multiple origins’
| Date :28-May-2020 |
BEIJING:
IN WHAT seems to be anabsolutely new theory, Chinese scientists have said that the nov-el coronavirus may not have itsorigin in theWuhan seafood mar-ket, which allegedly caused the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic.‘People’s Daily’, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, revealed onWednesday that new evidencesuggests ‘multiple origins of thetransmission of the virus’.
The leading newspaper of China wrote on Wednesday,“Chinese scientists have discov-ered a novel coronavirus cladethat is different from that sharedamong patients connected to theHuanan sea food market inWuhan, which provides new evi-dence that the market may notbe the origin of the virus thatcaused the pandemic.
”On the new theory of the virusorigin, the paper says, “Scientists collected viral genome samplesfrom 326 patients in Shanghai between January 20 and February25. They identified two major clades, both of which includedcasesdiagnosedin early December 2019. The scientists noticed that genomes of six patients with contact history related to the Huanan seafoodmarket fell into one kind of clade while those of three other patients diagnosed in the same period butwithout exposure to the marketclustered into the other clade,suggesting multiple origins of transmission in Shanghai.”