China suggests Italy may be the birthplace of COVID-19 pandemic

[ansible]

China is using a new study about the early, hidden spread of coronavirus in Italy to cast doubt on the firmly held assumption that the Asian nation was the birthplace of the pandemic, according to reports.

Officials in Beijing are pushing a new study that suggests the contagion may have been spreading in the European nation as early as September — three months before it was confirmed to be spreading in the long-assumed epicenter in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the Times of London noted.

The Asian nation has also previously questioned Spain about the origins of the pandemic, as well as the US military, claiming it brought the virus to Wuhan in October last year during the Military World Games, the report said.

Chinese state media have now been strongly pushing the idea that the new study by the National Cancer Institute proves that the contagion likely started in Italy, not China, according to the UK paper.

“This once again shows that tracing the virus’s source is a complex scientific question that should be left to scientists,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, according to the UK Times. “[It] is a developing process that can involve multiple countries.”

The World Health Organization has admitted it is possible that the virus “silently circulated elsewhere” before it was detected in Wuhan.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/20/china-suggests-italy-may-be-the-birthplace-of-covid-19-pandemic/

[stonecutter357]

1. trump is a racist pig !

[canetoad]

3. Don't doubt the truthiness of this statement

But fail to see how it contributes to discovering the source of Covid.

[Rstrstx]

2. This makes little sense

The virus is most closely related to several bat coronaviruses that have been collected in various caves in southern China. The closest one found so far is Bat-CoV-RaTG13, collected in Yunnan in 2013 after 3 of 6 miners had died the year before from Covid-like symptoms. The virus was collected by (of course) the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was one of 9 coronaviruses found in the cave and was apparently sequenced in 2018. This coincidence has led to plenty of extravagant conspiratorial scenarios, but RaTG13, while transmissible to humans, is not optimized for human-to-human transmission.

Whatever the origin of SARS-CoV-2 its closest relatives are in China, the first confirmed cases were in China, and China has not been completely transparent about the chain of events surrounding its origins. Why it would magically appear first in Europe makes no sense. On the other hand its undetected existence for years in some tiny village in southern China would be totally believable but nothing like that has been reported.

And this is not the first time the Chinese have used the 2019 Military Games in Wuhan in late October 2019 to spin up conspiracy theories, they previously suggested that the CIA had deployed it there, for what reasons is not entirely known. When trying to find a source for the latest Italian conspiracy proposed by the Chinese I traced the story back to that great British bastion of academic research, the Daily Mail.

Bottom line is the origin of the virus is still a mystery, what we do know is that when it was reported in Wuhan in late 2019 it was already optimized for human-to-human transmission. How it got that way is what we don’t know and is the 20 trillion dollar question, it may be years (if ever) before we find out. But given a choice between it A) coming from Europe versus B) coming from China I’ll go with B, final answer.

[lunasun]

4. I have seen documentaries about the Spanish flu and the possibility it should be called the Kansas f

flu We are early in tracking the origins of Covid so who knows Are we absolutely sure ? I thought Italy itself has detected this recently tracing back to fall 2019 I could be wrong