The first news on where Covid-19 started was the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. It is a large market where seafood and animals other than seafood were sold. There were a variety of live wild animals at the market before the pandemic including raccoon dogs, muskrats, pangolins and I presume bats and other wildlife that the Chinese like to slaughter on the spot and eat.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please read an update of 11th June 2023 which comes to a different conclusion. This investigation, obstructed by the Chinese, is in flux and developing. Hence the update. Click to read it.
It appears that there were little or no regulations governing the keeping and slaughter of these animals which meant animal cruelty and if the animals harboured a zoonotic unknown virus, it had the opportunity to ‘spill over’ from animal to human on the animals’ slaughter by market workers.
The virus would be set free from the animal’s body and the person killing the animal would inhale the virus in moisture particles. The full name and address of the market is: Huanan Seafood Market, 207 Fa Zhan Da Dao, Jianghan District, Wuhan, Hubei, China, 430032.
That was the initial belief. Then there was a lot of discussion about the Wuhan biolab being the source. The full name and address of this lab is: Institute of Virology, CAS: Hubei Engineering and Technology Research Center for Viral Diseases, 44 小洪山中区 Wuchang District, Wuhan, Hubei, China, 430071.
I have included the addresses as I wanted to find out how far they were from each other. Why? Because the latest news on where Covid-19 started is that there was a cluster of initial Covid-19 cases directly around the market.
The studies concluded that this was compelling circumstantial evidence that it started at the market and not the lab.
The lab is quite a distance from the market at around a 30-minute car drive away. This means that a cluster of cases around the market could not also be a cluster around the lab. I wanted to tick that box as all the excited information is about this cluster of cases.
One of these studies on Science.org entitled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic” concludes: “The precise events surrounding virus spillover will always be clouded, but all of the circumstantial evidence so far points to more than one zoonotic event occurring in Huanan market in Wuhan, China, likely during November–December 2019.”
That’s it in a nutshell. The opaque phrase ‘more than one zoonotic event’ (typical science-speak) means more than one person got Covid from an animal at the market. My early reading of the pandemic indicated that this might have been a pangolin which had caught Covid from a bat.
The Huanan Seafood Market has been cleaned up and some sort of regulations applied to prevent a recurrence. The same applies to around 20,000 similar markets in China. During this process any useful evidence which would have assisted scientists in deciding where the pandemic started was conveniently removed.
Now…what about compensation from Beijing for the trillions of dollars lost because of the pandemic and hundreds of lives lost?
