COVID-19 Origin | The next Wuhan could be anywhere in the world

Security personnel keep watch outside Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, February 3. (Image: Reuters)

Every time we think we have understood COVID-19, it surprises us in a bigger way. Is this the nature’s way to humble us down and ask us to behave?

The first human case of this new series of novel-coronaviruses was formally reported in December 2019 in Wuhan City in Hubei Province in China, presenting as a ‘severe respiratory illness’. It changed the world like very few events have done in the history of mankind. Despite more than one year into investigations, we are still almost clueless what happened where.

Last year was abuzz with conspiracy theories of a ‘man-made origin’, ‘leakage from Wuhan lab’, ‘genetically modified bio-warfare’ and the like. Come 2021, and the WHO seems to have closed the lid on these.

A delegation of WHO led by Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish Food Scientist, did not find evidence of origin of outbreak to be Wuhan laboratory. However, at the end of their four-week mission on February 9 (of which the first two weeks were spent in quarantine) his team was only partially satisfied with the data provided by Chinese authorities. Despite a minefield of data which helped in understanding spillage and transmission, there were “heated discussions” on the data provided.

There were about 72,000 cases Chinese authorities had identified who then narrowed them down to 92 cases for the WHO team. Since the idea was to explore cases before December 2019 in order to understand the origins, it was important to ask for the ‘raw data’ of these 72,000 cases, which was missing.

In an interview, Embarek said that the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019, and also suggested that by then there were a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan.

The team wrapped up its investigation by postulating that ‘cold chain’ of frozen animal products was a possible route of transmission, another being jumping from one species (possibly bats) to another intermediary species before infecting humans.

Following the lead of meat market of Huanan, and the animals susceptible to SARS viruses, (badgers, bamboo rats, rabbits, crocodiles, etc), they have highlighted Yunnan province on the border abutting Thailand and Myanmar as next stop. The investigation may then spill over into supply chains of Thailand and Cambodia.

One may dismiss all this as who cares how we got here — we are where we are — let’s get it over with now that vaccines are available in most parts of the world. But there’s a catch. We didn’t get here in a day or even in a month. Perhaps this has been brewing under our noses for years before surfacing. Similarly, we don’t know what more is silently brewing under the surface while we deal with this one.

Speaking in January, when the United Kingdom death tolls from COVID-19 rose above 100,000, Mark Woodhouse, Professor of Infectious Diseases, at University of Edinburgh, said the question for another pandemic with a new virus — the ‘Disease-X’ — is when, and not if.

If we back the clock, the famous TED talk by Microsoft’s Bill Gates in 2015 which predicted a COVID-19-like illness is still equally relevant for Disease-X.

Of course, we need to up our game in terms of improving our healthcare systems and vaccine research in order to deal with future threats in a quicker and more efficient way. But we also need to find out how this is happening, so measures could be put in place to stop it in its tracks.

This would require back-tracing all the data from earliest COVID-19 infections to trace the origins of each one of them — especially now that we know about half of them did not have direct contact with meat markets in question. The threads of intermediary species and tracing the cold chain back to South-East Asia could provide valuable insights, though it might be very painstaking and resource-consuming, besides being geopolitically charged. There would be politics and diplomacy at every step of investigation. But science demands this be done.

As an example, if the far end is traced to another country with a reservoir in bats (as we now know), and an intermediary species gets known as the crucial jump link, this link can be decoupled from the rest of the chain to break the chain of transmission. Short of it, anywhere in the world we can have a next Wuhan if we don’t know what we don’t know.

“The more you know the more you know you don’t know – Aristotle”