Just Earth News | @justearthnews | 17 Mar 2021, 04:22 am Print
Bat Covid 19 Image: Unsplash
Beijing: A group of researchers have found 24 previously unknown bat coronaviruses – four of them related to the strain which causes Covid-19 – all within a radius of less than 4 km in southwestern China, media reports said.
One virus carried “a genomic backbone arguably the closest to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date”, the research paper said, but none appeared to be a direct ancestor of the coronavirus responsible for the pandemic, reports The South China Morning Post.
The disease, which is believed to have originated from China, has now spread across the globe creating a health and economic crisis.
Meanwhile, independent experts of the World Health Organization (WHO) who have recently been on a mission in China will most likely present their report about the origins of the coronavirus next week, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said.
Technical experts have notified the WHO of their plans to present the report next week, Lindmeier said at a briefing.
It was previously expected that the report summing up the visit to China would be released this week.
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