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Elements

The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory

Did the virus spring from nature or from human error?

By Carolyn Kormann

October 12, 2021

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A red specimen on a laboratory slide tranforms between the shape of a
bad to a virus
Illustration by Rad Mora

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Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a
half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole
economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did
the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient
zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a
laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in
central China?

Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at Scripps Research,
in San Diego, began tracking the virus in January, 2020. He found the
degree of contagion not just scary but unusual. Chinese scientists
had already established that it belonged to a genus of coronaviruses
commonly found in bats in southern China. It shared eighty per cent
of its genome with the first SARS, and was more distantly related to
MERS, another bat coronavirus. This new virus, however, was spreading
far more quickly, reaching at least twenty-six countries by the end
of the month. "It seemed to be locked and loaded for causing the
pandemic," Andersen told me. Most viruses circulating in the wild,
though some can be deadly, are not very good at transmission. They
are still animal viruses. "This, almost from Day One," Andersen said,
"appeared like a human virus."

[kormann-ca]
Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
More:CoronavirusPandemicsWuhan, ChinaVirusesPublic HealthWorld Health
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