Firstly we can thank China's prolific animal trafficking trade and the idiocy of "traditional Chinese medicine" for the fact that this virus ever came into contact with humans.
citation request
And secondly let's remember that China's early response to the outbreak was to jail people for saying that there was an outbreak. As much as we mock the Trump administration's handling of this, let's keep in mind that China's was 1000 times worse. They have a lot to answer for.
I think China should be paying reparations when this is over, especially to Italy and the other hardest-hit countries.
no - on December 31 of last year, China alerted the World Health Organization of an outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus (initially called SARS-CoV-2) - one causing sever illness. As I understand, it took China from 'mid-December' to that Dec 31 alert point to ascertain just what they were dealing with... as I read, shortly after the WHO was alerted, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and made the data available to researchers worldwide. I understand the believed first occurrence in a human has been traced back to Dec 8th... with the number of confirmed cases on Dec 31 pegged at 266. But yes, how China handled public dissemination of the early circumstances and responses (or lack thereof),
within China, can be (and has been) scrutinized; however, member kimmy, let's read your account of how China, the nation, should be held accountable for information provided(or not) to other countries and the responses those countries took (or didn't take) - notwithstanding the respective preparedness of countries to any pandemic event.
now, as to the exact origin of the virus, as I understand that has not been determined and most likely never will be. What has been determined through analysis of the public genome sequence data is that the evolution of the virus has been determined to have originated through natural processes - natural evolution; i.e., "
not made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered". To this point,
related studies have pointed to the origination as either:
=>
the virus evolved to its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and then jumped to humans. Given similarity to bat coronavirus, research has proposed bats as the most likely reservoir for COVID-19; however, as there are no documented cases of direct bat-human transmission, an intermediate host is believed to be involved between bats and humans.
OR
=> a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal host into humans and then evolved to its current pathogenic state within the human population. In this circumstance, a coronavirus in armadillo-like mammals found in Asia and Africa has a similarity to the COVID-19 virus... in this case either directly from "an anteater type mammal directly to a human, or through intermediaries like civets or ferrets to a human.