BEIJING, March 3 (Xinhua) -- Medical researchers have found that a freezer cabinet in a laboratory in Phnom Penh and an irrigation pipe in a wildlife sanctuary in Thailand are "not the most obvious places" for the origin-tracing of COVID-19, according to a recent report published by South China Morning Post.
A team of researchers in the Institut Pasteur in Cambodia studied more than 400 samples collected from bats on field trips and kept in biobank freezers. There, they found a decade-old bat pathogen seen as one of the closest known relatives to the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which is linked to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
The virus was "92.6 percent identical" to the one that causes COVID-19, making it among the first found outside China. But unlike Sars-CoV-2, there was no indication this virus could infect people, the researchers said.
The results came weeks before a batch of researchers in Thailand published findings from samples taken from 100 bats living in an irrigation pipe in a wildlife sanctuary, in which a virus was discovered 91.5 percent identical to Sars-CoV-2 virus at the whole genome level, said the report.
The other was an indication from blood tests that some of the bats had previously been infected with a virus that was even closer to the one that causes COVID-19 than the virus they uncovered there, according to Wang Linfa, director of the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.
Those findings reportedly indicate a wide range of related viruses in Asia. Wang said it was possible the Sars-CoV-2 bat ancestor virus, or the virus in an intermediate animal, could be in Southeast Asia, where there was greater bat diversity than in China. Enditem