A new study by Chinese researchers has now claimed that the COVID-19 virus originated in the summer of 2019 in “north-central India and Pakistan” instead of the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first case of COVID-19 was reported in December last year, The EurAsian Times reported.
As the virus reproduces, it mutates with small changes in the DNA every time. The researchers argued that the original virus can be tracked down with the strain that has the lowest mutation. The study used the method to search the least mutated strain using SARS-CoV-2 whole-genome sequences. It said that the least mutated strain is the original virus.
Using the method, the scientist believed that the evidence pointed to eight countries where the virus could have been originated. The countries are Bangladesh, the USA, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, the Czech Republic, Russia or Serbia. It eliminated the possibility that Wuhan was the city where it originated.
“Both the least mutated strain’s geographic information and the strain diversity suggest that the Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurred, which was three or four months prior to the Wuhan outbreak,” the paper noted.
The study further argued that the virus mutation in India and Bangladesh was low and since they are neighboring countries it raised the possibility that the first case originated there.
Moreover, the paper said that the virus originated in July or August 2019 after northern-central India and Pakistan suffered the second-longest recorded heat wave that led to a water crisis.
“The water shortage made wild animals such as monkeys engage in the deadly fight over water among each other and would have surely increased the chance of human-wild animal interactions,” said the paper. “We speculated that the [animal to human] transmission of SARS-CoV-2 might be associated with this unusual heatwave.”
