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I think that the wet markets are a concern because they involve the hunting/capture/farming and transport of often exotic animals into highly populated cities which gives an opportunity for animals carrying novel viruses to come into contact with lots of people. However, in this instance, the wet market in Wuhan is not considered as the cause of the outbreak because the virus was circulating elsewhere in the city, which means someone brought it into the market -a prime high traffic area to faciliatate an outbreak. This is the view of one of the WHO mission scientists who gave an interview to Science:
Q: If you take all of this together, what do we know? What’s the most likely scenario for how and when SARS-CoV-2 started circulating?
A: It’s now clear that during the second half of December there was wide circulation of the virus in Wuhan. The contribution of the market at that time was not so important anymore because the virus was also circulating elsewhere in the city. That to me is a big finding. That was not the picture we had before. The cases outside the market were showing differences in terms of [virus] sequence diversity. Whether that indicates multiple introductions to the city or a single introduction a little bit earlier, followed by spread in different parts of the city, is still unclear. But it all points towards an introduction in the human population in that area in the period October to early December 2019—most probably late November, not so long before the earliest cases were found. But the route of introduction remains a mystery.
Full interview: 'Politics was always in the room.' WHO mission chief reflects on China trip seeking COVID-19’s origin'
