‘a biological plausibility’
but we shouldn’t be so quick to blame the poor pangolin. after all, we are still waiting on the genome sequence and the research paper. researchers are simply highlighting pangolins as a plausible potential carrier.
still, it’s not the first time that the pangolin has been linked to the coronavirus. another paper was published in october 2019 identifying the
coronavirus in the malaysian pangolin, b
ut it only studied dead animals, and didn’t determine whether the coronavirus was the cause of death. the findings were also done on older samples of pangolins with the results published more than two months before the first case of covid-19 was diagnosed in a human.
based on the prior publication that showed coronavirus found in the malay pangolin, there is a biological plausibility, said dr. tara smith, an infectious diseases epidemiologist and professor at ohio’s kent state university college of public health. however, there is still a lot of missing data.
“we really need the details. how closely related are these viruses to the novel coronavirus, how were the pangolins sampled, where were they taken from,” said dr. smith.
the sars epidemic also had an intermediate animal: the civet cat, which allowed the virus to move from bats before moving to humans. a few years later, dromedary (one-humped) camels were presented as a
possible intermediary source
of mers between bats and humans. though the mers coronavirus has been
found in camels
, it has not been confirmed.
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