What sparked the COVID pandemic? Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs
More than five years on, studies suggest the animal is the most likely culprit, but other candidates haven't been ruled out.
That cretin Jaye (“Jasin”) doesn’t seem to think raccoon dogs exist, LOL.
This time
five years ago, the virus that causes COVID-19 was spreading around the globe unchecked. One of the biggest questions that remains is: where did it come from?
Today, mounting evidence from more than a dozen studies point to a person, or people, catching the virus from a wild animal or animals at the
Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, the city at the epicentre of the outbreak. And the animal at the top of the list is the
raccoon dog (
Nyctereutes procyonoides).
“There is a large focus on raccoon dogs,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California.
Some scientists, including virologist Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney in Australia, have suspected raccoon dogs all along. On 21 January 2020, he sent an e-mail to Andersen and another colleague, with the subject ‘Outbreak poker’. In jest, he proposed a wager on the animal that might have carried the virus to people. “I’m betting raccoon dog,” he said. Holmes had seen raccoon dogs at the Huanan market when he travelled to Wuhan in 2014.
But part of the reason that raccoon dogs top the list of suspects is because they have been studied more than other animals, including ones also present at the market, says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There are yet more possible candidates, he says.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, agrees. “We have to be modest about our ability to predict which animal species” sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, she says.
The origin of the pandemic is still deeply politicized, and the lack of clear answers hasn’t helped. The virus probably originated in bats living in southern China. From there, many scientists think it infected an intermediate animal that passed it to people. The virus could also have passed directly from bats, although that is considered less likely given their habitat is far from Wuhan. And some still suggest that the virus could have escaped, or been deliberately released, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was known to be doing research on coronaviruses.
Viral host
One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in
several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.
This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2
1.
They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.
Studies by Holmes and his colleagues have also shown that farmed and wild raccoon dogs in China are often infected with many viruses that can jump between species. “Raccoon dogs are very common viral hosts,” says Holmes.
