The Express, February 2, Angus Dalgleish
Covid was the name of the disease caused by a new coronavirus, which led to a new respiratory disease in Wuhan, China, which rapidly spread throughout the world, firstly Italy and then to the rest of Europe, America, South America and the Far East.
It was first recognised in the UK in late January 2020 and a major wave of infection became obvious in February and March 2020, when the Government panicked and on the advice of SAGE and modellers introduced a totally unnecessary lockdown as, by the time it was introduced the first wave was decreasing. In retrospect, the virus was clearly in Europe in November and December and although a wave of acute illness was first recognised in Wuhan in November 2019 there were reports of a similar disease as far back as September 2019.
It was rapidly established that the cause of Covid was a coronavirus and that it was different from the two previous outbreaks, namely SARS-1, which involved direct bat transmission to an intermediary animal known as the civet, and MERS, which broke out in the Middle East and involved camels as the intermediate.
When the virus was identified and sequenced and called SARS-COV-2 it was immediately assumed by all that this clearly had come from a bat and hunt for an intermediate, especially in the meat markets, was sought.
The narrative around the world that this was clearly a virus that had come directly from a bat (and possibly involving another animal) at the notorious wet markets in Wuhan, which were not that far from a major virology institute, known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). It was not unrealistic to assume that Covid was the cause of another jump from a bat to a human coronavirus because the last two epidemics had been shown to be just that.
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