Coronavirus: unlikely clues to Covid-19 virus family found in Cambodia lab freezer, Thai drain pipe
- Fresh findings expand the range of known coronaviruses related to the one that causes Covid-19
- Researchers look for ‘bat zero’ in the quest to identify the initial animal hosts
“We know these coronaviruses can be found in bats, so it’s not surprising that we found this virus in a bat and it’s not surprising that the virus is very similar to Sars-CoV-2. The surprising part, really, was that it’s from 2010 and that it’s in Cambodia,” said Erik Karlsson, deputy head of the institute’s virology unit.
The frozen virus came from a palm-sized horseshoe bat that roosted in a cave near the Mekong River, some 1,130km (700 miles) south of the Chinese cave where the bat virus with the closest genetic similarity to Sars-CoV-2 was found. It’s one of several recent discoveries in Asia, including in bats living in the Thai drainage pipe, that expand the known range of related coronaviruses as scientists hunt for the source of Covid-19.
The suffering and damage caused by the pandemic has focused attention on this search like none other. The World Health Organization repeated scientific consensus that the virus likely came from a bat after a fact-finding team this month concluded a visit to Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid-19 patients were first identified.
This view surmises the bat virus was likely to have migrated to another animal which then infected humans. But so far no bat or animal virus has been found that is genetically close enough to Sars-CoV-2 to count as a direct relative or immediate ancestor.