The World Health Organization has said that it believes it has found the origin of COVID-19, but it’s not the Wuhan wet market.
The world has grown used to the COVID-19 pandemic as it has been around for quite some time, but just now, we are hearing that the origin of the mysterious virus may have been found.
The World Health Organization sent a team of investigators to Wuhan, China, to uncover the mysterious origin of COVID-19.
Now, one of the members of the WHO’s team of investigators has said that the Wuhan wet market isn’t the origin of COVID-19, but instead, it’s the market’s supplier, wildlife farms in southern China.
Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO delegation, said that the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic is these wildlife farms.
Daszak spoke to NPR and said that the Chinese government’s response to these farms indicates that they were aware that these farms were the most likely source of COVID-19.
These farms “take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” says Daszak. “It was very successful, in 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry.”
Then on February 24th, 2020, the Chinese government did something very important, “They put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food.
They sent out instructions to the farmers about how to safely dispose of the animals – to bury, kill or burn them – in a way that didn’t spread disease.” says Daszak.
These wildlife farms supplied the markets in Wuhan, which were previously believed to be the source of the outbreak.
However, now WHO officials or at least Daszak believe that the virus’s origin can be accurately traced back to wildlife farms that supplied the markets with products. “I do think that SARS-CoV-2 first got into people in South China. It’s looking that way”, says Daszak.