“What’s the chance that there were two different lab leaks?” he asked. He said the bulk of the scientific evidence at this point supports a natural exposure at the market, and pointed to research published last summer showing the market was likely the early epicenter of the scourge and concluding that the virus spilled from animals into people two separate times.

But it doesn’t necessarily say that the dog was infected with the virus it just says that they were in the same very small area.” Michael Imperiale of the University of Michigan, a microbiology and immunology expert who was not involved in the data analysis, said finding a sample with sequences from the virus and a raccoon dog “places the virus and the dog in very close proximity. Goldstein said his group presented its findings this week to a WHO advisory panel investigating COVID-19′s origins. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down.” But he told Science magazine the sequences are “nothing new. Gao Fu, the former head of the Chinese CDC and lead author of the Chinese paper, didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press email requesting comment. The new findings do not settle the question, and they have not been formally reviewed by other experts or published in a peer-reviewed journal. But Wuhan is home to several labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling theories scientists say are plausible that the virus may have leaked from one. Many scientists believe it most likely jumped from animals to people, as many other viruses have in the past, at a wildlife market in Wuhan, China.

How the coronavirus emerged remains unclear. “These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday. BEIJING (AP) - Genetic material collected at a Chinese market near where the first human cases of COVID-19 were identified show raccoon dog DNA comingled with the virus, adding evidence to the theory that the virus originated from animals, not from a lab, international experts say.

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