Both pieces of research rule out a lab leak as the source of the virus.
The two reports trace the outbreak back to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which sold live animals.
The research included genetic analyses of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from people infected in December 2019 and January 2020, as well as geolocation analyses connecting these samples to a section of the market where live animals were sold.
Taken together, these different lines of evidence point towards the market as the source of the outbreak, Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and an author on two of the reports told Nature magazine.
“This is extremely strong evidence,” he said.
Another virologist and research co-author, Michael Worobey, from the University of Arizona, told Nature that his thinking on the origins of COVID-19 had shifted.
In 2021, in a letter to Science magazine, he and other researchers pressed the scientific community to keep an open mind about whether the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But since then, additional evidence has come to light that supports a zoonotic origin story similar to that of HIV, Zika virus, Ebola virus and multiple influenza viruses, he says.
“When you look at all of the evidence, it is clear that this started at the market,” he says.
