Claims made by US President and others that the virus could’ve leaked from facility were “pure fabrication”: Director of Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wuhan| The virology institute in the Chinese city of Wuhan where the novel coronavirus first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new infection wreaking chaos globally, its director has said.
Scientists believe novel coronavirus originated in bats and could have been transferred to people via another mammal.
Claims made by US President and others that the virus could’ve leaked from the facility were “pure fabrication”, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN.
Wang Yanyi, in the interview shot on May 13 and broadcast Saturday night, said the centre has “isolated and obtained some coronaviruses from bats.”
“Now we have three strains of live viruses… But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8%,” she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.
One of their research teams has been studying bat coronaviruses since 2004 and centred on the “source tracing of SARS”, the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago. This research is led by Professor Shi Zhengli.
“We know that the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80% similar to that of SARS. It’s an obvious difference,” she said.
The SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence didn’t match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied, Professor Shi Zhengli said in an interview with Scientific American.
Also Read: India Joins 62 Nations Seeking Probe Into Coronavirus Origin In China
Across the globe, 213 nations or territories have been badly affected by the highly contagious novel coronavirus.
New cases fell to zero in China on Saturday.
India is the 11th most-affected country in the world in terms of the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, overtaking China. However, its tally of active cases exceeds those of some top-ten countries including Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey and Iran.
Globally, the total number of COVID-19 cases topped 5,300,000 while the death toll crossed 342,000, as per the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
The United States, the worst affected nation in the world, recorded over 1.6 Million cases of COVID-19, nearly one-third of the entire world’s caseload, as per Johns Hopkins University data.
While the world is grappling against the pandemic, nations have come together to find the origin of the novel coronavirus. This independent investigation is led by Australia.
(Inputs from Agence France-Presse)
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