Published 14:54 IST, July 7th 2020
Oxford expert claims coronavirus existed worldwide before emerging in China
An Oxford University expert has made a sensational claim on novel coronavirus outbreak, saying the virus existed worldwide before it first emerged in China.
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An Oxford University expert has made a sensational claim on novel coronavirus outbreak, saying the virus existed across the globe before it first emerged in Wuhan. According to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford, said that the novel coronavirus broke out whenever and wherever it found favourable conditions.
Jefferson opined that the virus was omnipresent in a dormant state and got activate by favourable environmental conditions. He wondered how the coronavirus reached Falklands Islands, a remote archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean on the Patagonian Shelf, or passengers on a cruise ship, that travelled from South Georgia to Buenos Aires, suddenly tested positive on the eighth day.
Referring to the Spanish Flu of 1918, Jefferson said that around 30 per cent of the population of Western Samoa died of the disease while they had no communication with the outside world. He stressed at the possibility of such viruses being omnipresent and something triggers their outbreak.
"The explanation for this could only be that these agents don't come or go anywhere. They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should be looking for," he was quoted as saying.
Strange reports from Italy, Spain
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not known but preliminary studies suggested that the bats could be the source since the coronavirus present in bats has a genome that is 96 per cent identical to the novel coronavirus. It is believed that pangolin was the immediate host because the bat coronavirus cannot bind to receptors in human cells, however, there has not been any concrete evidence.
However, recent reports from Spain and Italy, claiming to have traces of novel coronavirus from sewage water before the virus outbreak in China, have left experts wondering about the origin. A renowned Chinese virologist claimed that the novel coronavirus is just “the tip of the iceberg” and called for an advanced study of the unknown viruses.
(With agency inputs)
14:54 IST, July 7th 2020