Thread by @BenFPiercePhD

The elusive raccoon dog. A mammal susceptible to #SARS2, sold live at the Huanan Market by 2019 - could it or other mammals have caused the #COVID outbreak in December 2019?

More #covidorigins data indicates that yes, such animals remain the most likely culprit. 1/11

A wonderfully written - please read it - new preprint explains the context of missing gaps prior to this analysis. One being whether the lineage A sample found in the Market in Jan 2020, published only in Feb 2022, was indeed lineage A. 2/11
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

There were some questions: the A case was known in 2021 (left) but not included in the WHO Final Report on COVID origins (right, see upper left of both). [This and the presence of live animals sold at the Huanan market were both absent in the Final Report.] 3/11

This team found conclusively that, yes, this environmental sample was indeed lineage A, and they found no intermediates with lineage B.

More evidence that 2 spillovers occurred and that Market was not a superspreader. 4/11

And if #SARS2 were circulating long before (or, gasp!, derived from the WIV), and the Market was 'only' a superspreader, the timing to the most common recent ancestors for the market sequences would be different to all other sequences.

They were not different. 5/11

What this is telling us is that the timing, and the presence of both lineages at the Market, are supporting the zoonotic theory. These events are even predicted by the Market 2-spillover theory. 6/11

This preprint further supports that the 1 Jan sampling was focused on cases, and 12 Jan on wildlife stalls.

This preprint beautifully explains what was found on 12 Jan. 7/11

"1 read out of 200 billion!", an oft repeated mock...yet the preponderance of positive #SARS2 results, in stalls with more animal DNA found than human - wow! Drains adjacent were found to be positive even in mid-February.

Because, look, infected animals shit a lot of virus. 8/11

The team also found other viruses, susceptible to spillover, and compared the findings from Huanan with other markets, indicating that the source was likely from South of Wuhan. 9/11

What has this study found? Evidence that retrospective studies of animal swabs, particularly from raccoon dogs, masked palm civets, hoary
bamboo rats, Malayan porcupines and Amur 🦔 's, are greatly needed. 10/11

➡️Conclusive lineage A
➡️MRCA timing, and agreement
➡️Analysis on Stall A - owned by a Mr. Jin, fined for previously selling illegal animals prepandemic - which showed multiple evidence of animals+virus
➡️A geo-frame for analysing retro-samples

Many thanks to the team.