By: Phoebe Huang

Where did Covid come from? More than 3 years into the pandemic, its origin remains unknown.

Both practical and absurd theories have emerged throughout the years. One school of thought holds that Covid spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, selling large amounts of fish, meats and wildlife.

A second school, implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by way of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research complex on the eastern side of the city. Potentially after benevolent but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.

However, much of the evidence that would provide answers has either been lost or is unavailable because of failures to gather relevant material promptly; unavailable because of secrecy. The government had concealed most of the information, making it hard to determine the actual origin.

Take the first hypothesis, for example, and assume that the virus was passed by a wild animal. To test that hypothesis, you would need some form of substance like feces or blood. You would test those samples for signs of the virus. If you found the virus itself, or at least bits of its genome¹, you could then make a comparative analysis of genomes, including some from the earliest human cases, to deduce whether people got the virus from the wildlife or vice versa.

But scientists can’t do that. Whatever wild animals were on sale in the market during December 2019 had vanished by Jan. 1, 2020. On that date, the market was closed by order of Chinese authorities, with no (reported) effort to sample the most suspect forms of wildlife.

Because of the limited data, it has been hard for theories to be proven. As practical as they may seem, we cannot be sure of any of the theories because of the unavailable evidence. I chose to just believe one that I thought was practical- the first one, and you can do the same, or you could make your own theory and continue hearing others.