Virologist Says Coronavirus May Have Evolved In Chinese Miner Infected In 2012 - Reports

The SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved in the body of a Chinese miner over six months, after he contracted a bat-carried coronavirus in 2012, a US virologist reportedly suggested

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th October, 2021) The SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved in the body of a Chinese miner over six months, after he contracted a bat-carried coronavirus in 2012, a US virologist reportedly suggested.

Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, told a BMJ webinar that the virus had been observed to make "strange evolutionary leaps," developing large numbers of mutations while in the body of a single patient.

"The theory requires many hundreds of mutations in one miner to turn into SARS-Cov-2. Decades were crammed into about six months," he was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

Six miners contracted a coronavirus while cleaning up feces in a bat-infested cave in western China in 2012.

Three of them died after developing pneumonia-like symptoms. Tissue samples were sent to the Wuhan lab, rumored to be linked to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Lawrence Sellin, who holds a PhD in biology and worked at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, told WION last year that the RaTG13 coronavirus, the closest bat virus relative of SARS-Cov-2, needed to go through the evolution of 1,200 nucleotides, which has never been described to occur in one patient.

But Latham said that the emergence of the Alpha strain of SARS-CoV-2 in Kent evidenced the "surprising phenomenon of isolated cases of greatly accelerated evolution in viruses in Britain."