Off The Record
China Has Found A New Coronavirus That Could Create A Pandemic
China has found another coronavirus that is thought to be strong enough to infect people.
Scientists from the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered the novel strain in bats in settings hauntingly reminiscent of the early days of Covid.
Just two years after the worst was deemed to be past, there are concerns that history may repeat itself since HKU5-CoV-2 is remarkably similar to the pandemic virus.
The new virus is much more closely related to MERS, a more deadly coronavirus that may kill up to one-third of its victims.
‘Batwoman’ for her research on coronaviruses, virologist Shi Zhengli, spearheaded the finding, which was published in a prestigious scientific journal.
According to tests, HKU5-CoV-2 entered human cells similarly to how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, did.
The Beijing-funded researchers acknowledged that there was a “high risk of spillover to humans, either through direct transmission or facilitated by intermediate hosts” when they shared their findings in the journal Cell.
MERS is a respiratory disease that can be transmitted from people to animals and vice versa. In extreme circumstances, it can be lethal and produce fever, coughing, dyspnea, diarrhea, and vomiting.
MERS has only previously been detected in two US patients, both of whom tested positive in May 2014 and were connected to Middle Eastern travel. The virus has no known vaccination.
The coronavirus known as HKU5-CoV-2 is a member of the merbecovirus family of viruses.
Minks and pangolins, the mammals thought to act as a conduit for COVID between bats and people, have been found to harbor merbecoviruses.
This “suggests frequent cross-species transmission of these viruses between bats and other animal species,” the researchers stated.
They added, “This study reveals a distinct lineage of HKU5-CoVs in bats that efficiently use human [cells] and underscores their potential zoonotic risk.”
However, the new evidence indicates that HKU5-CoV-2 has a ‘greater potential for interspecies infection’ than previous HKU5-CoV viruses, which were first identified in bats in 2006.
The possibility that HKU5-CoV-2 could spread to people, however, “remains to be investigated.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the heart of the lab-leak theory—which holds that Covid-19 was produced in a Chinese lab and unintentionally spilled to the public—conducted the study.
According to the most recent study, the Covid-19 pandemic is thought to have been caused by a zoonotic spillover because bats are thought to be coronavirus reservoirs and contain the largest concentration of coronaviruses.
However, there is a low level of confidence among the US intelligence community that Covid leaked from the WIV.
The current study claims that although there is proof of animal-to-human transmission for both SARS and MERS, the “intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2 remain unclear.”
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