A group of researchers say they have more evidence to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic started in a Chinese seafood market where it spread from infected animals to humans.
The evidence is laid out in a recent study published in Cell, a scientific journal, nearly five years after the first known COVID-19 outbreak.
Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist and virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, is a co-author in the study that looked at genetic evidence collected at the market, which suggests animals susceptible to the virus were being sold there.
“Up until this, we didn’t have that clue or that link,” Rasmussen said.
The team’s previous research pointed to the market in Wuhan, China as the origin of the pandemic. But for that to be true, the transmission would have had to come from live animals, Rasmussen said. Before the genetic evidence became available, there was only conflicting observational information for them to go …