Inside China’s Filthy Wet Markets

The Wuhan coronavirus genome has been sequenced. It jumped from bats to humans through a third incubator species last November. This isn’t the first coronavirus outbreak in China. Ignore the conspiracy theories about it being a biological weapon which are circulating on the internet.

Stat News:

“The progenitor virus itself was almost certainly one that circulates harmlessly in bats (as SARS does) but has an “intermediate reservoir” in one or more animals that come into contact with people, Andersen said. Presumably, that reservoir is one of the species of animals at the Wuhan market thought to be ground zero for the outbreak. The ancestor of 2019-nCoV existed in that species for some unknown time, never infecting people, until by chance a single virus acquired a mutation that made it capable of jumping into and infecting humans.

The genome sequences suggest that was a one-time-only jump. “The genomes [from the 24 samples] are very uniform,” Andersen said. “If there had been multiple introductions,” including from many different animals, “there would be more genomic diversity. This was a single introduction.” …

Unfortunately, genetic analysis can’t identify what animal species the coronavirus jumped from into humans. But an analysis by a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, posted to the preprint server bioRxiv, determined that the genome of this coronavirus (the seventh known to infect humans) is 96% identical to that of a bat coronavirus, suggesting that species is the original source. (Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, another team of scientists in China reported that the new coronavirus is 86.9% identical to the bat SARS-like coronavirus.) …”

New York Post:

“You can usually smell the markets before you see them.

Especially if you’re downwind.

It’s a sickly, almost sweet and nauseating smell of death. Once inside, the fetid stench — made worse by blistering temperatures and zero refrigeration — is overwhelming, and it is places like this where the deadly coronavirus originated.

In stall after stall, a mix of live and dead animals, which run the gamut from the known (pig, ox, duck, chicken) to the rare or unknown due to the condition of the carcass — stare back at you. In the wet areas of the market — usually reserved for fish and sea creatures and where the ground is slick with water and often blood — the stink is worse. The animals that have not yet been dispatched by the butcher’s knife make desperate bids to escape by climbing on top of each other and flopping or jumping out of their containers (to no avail). At least in the wet areas, the animals don’t make a sound. The screams from mammals and fowl are unbearable and heartbreaking.

These unregulated and usually filthy markets are found all over Asia and Africa. …”

New York Times:

“LANGFANG, China — The typical market in China has fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens — with heads and beaks attached — and live crabs and fish, spewing water out of churning tanks. Some sell more unusual fare, including live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.

The markets are fixtures in scores of Chinese cities, and now, for at least the second time in two decades, they are the source of an epidemic that has spread fear, taxed the Communist Party bureaucracy and exposed the epidemiological risks that can spawn in places where humans and wildlife converge. …”