Coronavirus Was Circulating Two Months Before COVID-19 Cases Reported in China

 Washington: The novel coronavirus was likely circulating undetected for at the most two months before the primary human cases of COVID-19 were described in Wuhan, China in late December 2019, consistent with a study.

The research, published within the journal Science, used molecular dating tools and epidemiological simulations so far the emergence of the virus to as early as October 2019.

The team, including researchers from the University of California San Diego within the US, notes that their simulations suggest that the mutating virus dies out naturally quite three-quarters of the time without causing a plague.

Joel O Wertheim, professor at UC San Diego School of drugs and senior author of the study said, “Our study was designed to answer the question of how long could SARS-CoV-2 have circulated in China before it had been discovered.”

“To answer this question, we combined three important pieces of information: an in-depth understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 spread in Wuhan before the lockdown, the genetic diversity of the virus in China, and reports of the earliest cases of COVID-19 in China,” Wertheim added.

By combining these disparate lines of evidence, the researchers were ready to put an upper limit of mid-October 2019 for when SARS-CoV-2 started circulating in Hubei province.

Cases of COVID-19 were first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, located within the Hubei province of central China.

The researchers used molecular clock evolutionary analyses to undertake to range in on when the primary, or index, case of SARS-CoV-2 occurred.

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“Molecular clock” may be a term for a way that uses the mutation rate of genes to deduce when two or more life forms diverged ‒ during this case, when the common ancestor of all variants of SARS-CoV-2 existed, estimated during this study to as early as mid-November 2019.

Molecular dating of the foremost recent common ancestor is usually taken to be synonymous with the patient of an emerging disease.

“The patient can conceivably predate the common ancestor ‒ the particular first case of this outbreak may have occurred days, weeks, or maybe many months before the estimated common ancestor,” said study co-author Michael Worobey, a professor at the University of Arizona.

“Determining the length of that ‘phylogenetic fuse’ was at the guts of our investigation,” Worobey said.

Based on this work, the researchers estimate that the median number of persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 in China was but one until November 4, 2019.

Thirteen days later, it had been four individuals, and just nine on December 1, 2019, they said.

The first hospitalizations in Wuhan with a condition later identified as COVID-19 occurred in mid-December.

The researchers used a spread of analytical tools to model how the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have behaved during the initial outbreak and youth of the pandemic when it had been largely an unknown entity.

These tools included epidemic simulations that supported the virus’s known biology, like its transmissibility and other factors.

In just 29.7% of those simulations was the virus ready to create self-sustaining epidemics.

In the other 70.3%, the virus-infected relatively few persons before dying out. the typically failed epidemic ended just eight days after the patient.

“We saw that over two-thirds of the epidemics we attempted to simulate went extinct. meaning that if we could return in time and repeat 2019 100 times, two out of 3 times, COVID-19 would have fizzled out on its own without igniting an epidemic, Wertheim noted.

“This finding supports the notion that humans are constantly being bombarded with zoonotic pathogens,” he added.

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