There is overwhelming evidence that the virus that causes COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans, rather than escaping from a laboratory, virus experts say.
Conspiracy theories suggest the virus escaped a Chinese lab due to lax security. The Trump administration is investigating that possibility, Fox News has reported.
One of the labs carried out research on bat coronaviruses, much of which was published in international journals. Four per cent does not sound like a lot, but for a virus it is a huge difference – huge enough to conclusively signal RaTG13 did not become SARS-CoV-2.The common ancestor for RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 existed about 50 years ago, estimated Professor Edward Holmes, the University of Sydney scientist who first sequenced CoV-2’s genome.
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