THE Covid-19 coronavirus is similar to one detected in bats in China in 2013. But a failure to act on the warnings of those who studied it means we missed an opportunity to protect human health.
While some are now saying the Covid-19 virus passed to humans from pangolins, it is likely that pangolins are merely victims of the infection, like us. “From the virology evidence available to date, the virus is almost certainly from a species of bat,” says Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London.
For years, Zheng-Li Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been isolating coronaviruses from horseshoe bats in caves in China's Yunnan province. In 2013, they found a coronavirus that could infect human cells in the lab. Last week, Shi reported that this virus is 96 per cent identical to the Covid-19 virus now spreading in people.
In 2016, Wayne Marasco at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that the virus discovered by Shi's team could replicate in human airway cells. They described it as being “poised for human emergence”. However, they say further research on this virus was hampered by the US government's ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous.
Shi's work has also revealed that viruses can pass directly from bats to people living near their caves. Her findings suggest we didn't need pangolins to catch the Covid-19 virus, just as she previously revealed that SARS can come directly from bats without first infecting civets.
96% The similarity between Covid-19 virus and a virus found in 2013
Last year, Shi warned that it was highly likely coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. “The investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs,” she wrote.
Now this opportunity has been missed, Shi has made a plea for increased efforts to develop drugs and vaccines.