[1][6] Thirty-three out of 585 environmental samples (5.6%) obtained from the market indicated evidence of COVID-19 outbreak, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
[11] The market was located in the newer part of the city, near shops and apartment blocks,[12] about 800 meters (2,600 ft) from Hankou railway station,[13] and close to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.
This term is used for koalas in Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, but in China, they are called "考拉" (read as "kǎolā").
The wild animals on sale suffered poor welfare and hygiene conditions and were capable of hosting a wide range of infectious zoonotic diseases or disease-bearing parasites.
The existence of such a stall has been contested by Chinese authorities;[28][29] the stall had been photographed in 2014 by Edward C. Holmes, an Australian virologist who visited the market while working with local researchers, and while a guest professor with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) from 2014 to 2020; it had also been filmed by a local in December 2019 and posted on Weibo.
[31][29] Although the samples do not definitively prove that the raccoon dog is the "missing" intermediate animal host in the bat-to-human transmission chain, it does show that raccoon dogs were present in the Huanan market at the time of the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, in areas that were also positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and substantially strengthens this hypothesis as the proximal origin of the pandemic.
By 2 January 2020, a new strain of coronavirus, later determined to be SARS-CoV-2, was confirmed in an initial 41 people hospitalized with the pneumonia, two-thirds of whom had direct exposure to the market.
[36][37][38][39] Later studies hypothesized that pangolins may be the intermediate host of the virus originating from bats, analogous to the relationship between SARS-CoV and civets.
[6][45][46] A paper from a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, published in The Lancet, offered details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with SARS-CoV-2.
[46] Their data showed 13 of the initial 41 people found with the novel coronavirus had no link with the market, a significant figure, according to infectious diseases specialist Daniel Lucey.
[53] On 31 January 2021, a team of scientists led by the World Health Organization visited the wet market to investigate the origins of COVID-19.
[55] In late July 2022, two papers were published in the journal Science, both describing evidence that the pandemic likely began at the market, and probably did not originate at a laboratory.
[56][57][58][59] The Chinese government has long insisted that the virus originated outside China,[31] and until June 2021, denied that live animals were traded at the Huanan market.
[28] The New York Times was not able to reach the Chinese scientists for comment by 16 March,[30] but George Gao, the former head of the CCDC and lead author on the February 2022 preprint, told Science that there was "nothing new" in the raw data, and refused to answer questions about why his research team had removed it from the database.
[31] On 1 January 2020, in response to the initial outbreak of the pneumonia cluster, the health authorities closed the market to conduct investigations, clean, and disinfect the location.
[1][35] Chinese environmentalists, researchers, and state media have called for stricter regulation of exotic animal trade in wet markets.
[64] On 24 February 2020, the Chinese government announced that the trade and consumption of wild animals would be banned throughout China,[65][66] amidst mounting domestic criticism of the industry.