Comment by The Lancet Microbe

Peer-reviewed evidence available to the public points to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a result of spillover into humans from a natural origin. A geospatial analysis reports that 155 early COVID-19 cases from Hubei Province, China, in December, 2019, significantly clustered around a food market in Wuhan, China. Many genomic studies report that SARS-CoV-2 has nucleotide differences that could only have arisen through natural selection and such differences are evenly spread throughout the genome. Phylogenetic studies map these nucleotide changes and suggest that they have not diverged from the bat coronavirus RaTG13 that was being researched at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suggesting it is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a result of this research and instead they shared a common ancestor. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of enzootic circulation before spillover into people.