Pakistan has reported another death from Covid-19, the third in as many days, as the infectivity rate and infections soared. The country reported 150 coronavirus cases during the last 24 hours, showed the statistics released by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on Friday morning. According to the NIH data, the death toll in the country went up to 30,648 after adding another fatality whereas the number of total infections now shot up to 1,578,917 after adding the fresh 150 cases. During the last 24 hours (Thursday), 4,194 tests were conducted throughout Pakistan whereas the positivity ratio surged to 3.58%. The number of patients in critical care stood at 22. Raccoon dog data sparks new debate about Covid origins New evidence that raccoon dogs were at the Chinese market where Covid is suspected to have first infected humans has reignited debate over the origin of the pandemic.

The researchers who unexpectedly stumbled over the genetic data say that it supports -- but cannot definitively prove -- the theory that the virus originated in animals, possibly first jumping over to humans at the market in the city of Wuhan. The issue has proved divisive for the scientific community and even different US government agencies, with some maintaining that the virus likely leaked from a Wuhan lab -- a claim that China has angrily denied. Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization technical lead on Covid, said the new data doesnt give us the answer of how the pandemic began, but it does provide more clues. The data comes from swabs collected by a Chinese team in January and February 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Market, the site of one of the earliest Covid clusters, before it was shut down and cleared of animals.

International researchers including Florence Debarre, an evolutionary biologist at France CNRS research agency, were surprised to come across the data on the GISAID global science database earlier this month. They managed to download the data before it was removed from GISAID at the request of the Chinese researchers who first posted it. Debarre and colleagues informed the WHO about their discovery last week, when some media outlets started reporting on the data existence. This week the researchers published a report, which has not been peer- reviewed, saying that DNA from the samples shows that raccoon dogs, palm civets, Amur hedgehogs and bamboo rats were present at the market.

Raccoon dogs, whose closest relatives are foxes, are in particular known to be able to carry and transmit viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, which causes the Covid disease. That means they could have acted as an intermediary host between humans and bats, in which Covid is suspected to have originated. Some of the samples containing raccoon dog DNA were also positive for SARS- CoV-2. However because the samples were taken from sites at the market and not directly from the animals, it was not possible to prove the raccoon dogs had Covid. Notably, there was very little human DNA in one of the positive samples, raising the likelihood that it was the raccoon dog that had the virus.

We cannot rigorously demonstrate that the animal was infected, but it is a plausible explanation, Debarre told a foreign news agency. Even if it could be proved that the raccoon dogs were infected, it would be difficult to show they gave Covid to humans -- and not the other way around. The data is  one additional piece of the puzzle that supports an origin of the pandemic linked to Wuhan animal trade,said virologist Connor Bamford of Queen University Belfast. But  it is unlikely to provide irrefutable evidence,  he said on The Conversation website.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-INP