SCIO press conference on China's study of origins of SARS-CoV-2
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 14, 2023
CCTV:
This paper has indeed garnered much attention. What are the main findings of the China CDC's paper on the early research data on the Huanan Seafood Market, and are any new findings on origins tracing included? Thank you.
Tong Yigang:
Thank you for your questions. This paper describes how researchers from the China CDC conducted testing for SARS-CoV-2 and metagenomic sequencing on over 1,300 environmental samples and frozen animal samples collected from the Huanan Seafood Market between January and March 2020. The results showed that 400-plus animal samples tested negative, while 73 of the 900-plus environmental samples tested positive. During the testing process, they also isolated SARS-CoV-2 strains from three environmental samples and, after genome sequencing, found that the sequences of the viruses were almost 100% identical to that of infected cases at that time. This suggests that those viruses were from humans. In the analysis, some information on the hosts in environmental samples showed that the hosts were mainly humans and that there were also genes from pigs, cattle, chickens, ducks, cold chain products, and even gene fragments from mice and cats. These findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 detected was highly likely to have been introduced by humans. The data further supports the findings of the WHO-China joint study in the first phase. Thank you.
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