The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday said the evidence which is presently available points out that the origin of the novel coronavirus may have started in China last year.
According to the organization, the origin of the novel coronavirus did not start from a laboratory.
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Speaking to the media in Geneva, WHO spokesman Fadela Chaib said all available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else.
As per a Reuters report, Chaib claimed that there had to be an intermediate animal host to transfer the deadly virus to humans but it is still unclear how the process of transferring from one species to another had occurred.
“It most likely has its ecological reservoir in bats but how the virus came from bats to humans is still to be seen and discovered,” she added.
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US President Donald Trump had recently said that his administration was looking into reports that the novel coronavirus “escaped” from a Wuhan laboratory before it spread to the world.
“We’re looking at it, a lot of people are looking at it. It seems to make sense,” Trump had said earlier.
With the deadly coronavirus claiming a number of lives, there has been a lot of speculation on whether the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or from Huanan Seafood Market.
However, the institute’s research director Yuan Zhiming dismissed the rumoursthat his institute is the original source of COVID-19.
“We know what kind of research is going at the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples. There is no way that virus came from us,” he added.