On February 22, the Danish daily Politiken ran an article suggesting a market in Bangkok, Thailand, might have been the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 2 million worldwide.
Most experts believe that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. originated in bats and was passed on to another animal, from which it then spread to people. The virus was first identified in Wuhan, China.
The Politiken article, headlined: “Animal market in Bangkok could be the place that brought corona to Wuhan,” cited Thea Kølsen Fischer, a professor of virus epidemics at the University of Copenhagen.
Fischer was also on the recent World Health Organization fact-finding mission to investigate the source of the COVID-19 outbreak. (COVID-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants.)
The Danish article quoted Fischer as saying she considered it “highly likely” the coronavirus came to Wuhan through infected animals sold in markets exactly like Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market, which is among the world’s largest and has sections that sell wild animals, both as pets and for food.
“It is precisely such a market as Chatuchak that we look at with fear, because blood, feces, saliva, fur, and all sorts of other material that may contain viruses come into contact with many other animals and humans,” Politiken quoted Fischer as saying.
Denmark’s government-owned TV 2 also quoted Fischer naming Thailand as the possible place of origin for the outbreak.
“We have found out that the virus probably originated from the horseshoe bat. This type of bat is found both in southeastern China, but it is also found in other countries such as Cambodia and Thailand,” the channel quoted Fischer as saying.
According to TV 2, : “Another possibility is that a human being has been infected at a market in Thailand and then subsequently traveled to Wuhan.”
Fischer subsequently said on Twitter that she had been “not quite correctly quoted.” She wrote that “we only point to recent findings from … Thailand where horseshoe bats have also been shown to host viruses with high resemblance to SARS-CoV-2.”
The idea that the pandemic originated in Thailand is unsubstantiated but probably an easy leap from Fischer’s somewhat ambiguous remarks. To date, nobody has produced evidence linking a Thai market to the initial outbreak.
Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation the Bangkok Post on February 24 it had had conducted tests on various types of wildlife sold at Chatuchak Market, “both imported and local,” and had not found any animals infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Politiken’s editor-in-chief, Christian Jensen, also told Polygraph.info its article did not categorically state Chatuchak Market was the source.
“The story is correct, and it doesn’t state as a fact that the coronavirus originated exactly from the Chatuchak Market,” Jensen said. “It mentions the market as an example of the problematic ones, but it is clearly mentioned several times that you cannot pinpoint that exact market as the one from which corona was spread.”
Jensen noted that the article called Chatuchak Market “by far the largest animal market in Southeast Asia” but not the only one.
“[T]here are numerous smaller markets, some of which — as opposed to Chatuchak — also sell bats and slaughtered animals, which means that the virus could also easily have spread from one of those markets,” Politiken reported.
Meanwhile, Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation responded to a February 10 report by the Russian-state broadcaster Sputnik, there are bats in Thailand with a new coronavirus — RacCS203 — similar to SARS-CoV-2.
RacCS203 was found in the blood of five out of 100 sampled horseshoe bats living in an artificial cave in a wildlife sanctuary in eastern Thailand.
While the Sputnik article cited the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, the latter did not conclude that Thailand was the source of the novel coronavirus.
“Although the origin of the virus remains unresolved, our study extended the geographic distribution of genetically diverse SC2r-CoVs from Japan and China to Thailand over a 4800-km range,” .
Thailand’s Chulalongkorn and Kasetsart universities, along with the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, were integral to Nature Communications’ study.
Citing those researchers, the government said that while the newly discovered coronavirus shares 91.5% of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code, it could not be transmitted to humans, .