Chinese Authorities Claim That CoVid-19 First Emerged In India Or Potentially Greece In The Summer Of 2019

Chinese researchers have claimed that CoVid-19 did not originate in China but may have first entered the human population in India or perhaps other countries, including Greece. As it currently stands, it is widely thought that Covid-19 first entered the human population in Wuhan, China, possibly in a wet-market where a range of exotic animals are sold.

The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the University of Houston in the United States says that this is not necessarily the case and that the virus sprang up first in the summer of 2019 in India through dirty water. It is also claimed that the origins may have been in Europe, with Greece being named as a likely location.

The findings have been submitted for publication in the Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal. The report says:

"The water shortage made wild animals such as monkeys engage in the deadly fight over water among each other and would have surely increased the chance of human-wild animal interactions. We speculated that the zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 might be associated with this unusual heat wave as well. If it was the case, the heat wave would explain why SARS-CoV-2 is able to rapidly spread in the summer of 2020 while SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV usually slow down their spread in high temperatures."

The report added:

"Our result shows that Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened. Before it spread to Wuhan, SARS-CoV-2 has already experienced adaptive evolution during its human-to-human transmission."

The team are therefore claiming that it was unsanitary conditions in India that caused the virus spread and not the mismanagement of Chinese wet-markets.

The spread of the virus has at times been highly politicised, with President Trump calling the virus the fault of the Chinese and even naming it the 'Chinese-flu' or the 'kung-flu'. While the virus did first emerge in China, the country has been by far one of the most effective at halting its spread. It is thought that only around 5,000 people have died in China compared to over 250,000 in the United States. Scientists put this down to the extremely quick and powerful actions taken by Chinese authorities in closing down their societies.