• Question: How did Covid-19 start?

    Asked by path449yet on 10 Feb 2022.
    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 10 Feb 2022:

      Do you mean how the disease started, or how the virus did? Covid-19 stands for Coronavirus disease 2019, so is the actual disease that people get. It’s caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, which could have started elsewhere.

      We think the disease started in Wuhan, China, when a person came into contact with an animal that had the virus and it ‘jumped’ from that animal to a person. This might have happened once and that person passed it on to others, or it might have jumped to a few people. From there the people started to get the disease and passed it on to others, who passed it to others…

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 13 Feb 2022:

      Hi,
      Like Valerie said while we don’t know 100%, we think it came from animals like bats or pangolins. Those animals have very similar immune systems to humans so a virus that infects a bat can infect a human more easily than lets say a goldfish ;).
      From a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) we know that it came from fur farms where it was spreading around minks and then eventually infected the people who worked on the farms and from there it spread to other people.

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