Novel virus may have 'crossed from animals into humans' years ago: Study

A lot of posts on social media, WhatsApp forwards and even some news reports raise the question whether coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in China. But a team of scientists have said, according to an article published in Nature Medicine, that they did not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario was plausible in the case of SARS-CoV-2.

Referring to that article, Dr Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, puts forth two scenarios on the evolution of the novel coronavirus. In the first scenario, he suggests binding of coronavirus spike proteins with the ACE2 protein in humans after the former’s mutation. This could have enabled the infection of human cells, he says in a blog.

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“This scenario seems to fit other recent outbreaks of coronavirus-caused disease in humans, such as SARS, which arose from cat-like civets; and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which arose from camels,” Collins says.

In the second scenario, he says evolutionary changes could have enabled the new virus, which had already “crossed from animals into humans”, to cause disease in human beings. In fact, he says as per the study, the changes could have happened for years or even decades, after the transmission from animals to humans.