This week in virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind that make you sick.

From ASM Micro 2020, this is TWIV this week in virology, episode

2019 recorded on June 18th, 2023. I'm Vincent Rackeniello and you're listening to the podcast

all about viruses. We are in Houston today and the weather is, I should just say hot and humid,

37C, excessive heat warning, says that every day. My guest today from the University of Sydney,

Eddie Holmes, welcome back. Good to be back. Back by popular demand. You are on TWIV 940.

I forgot the title, it was a good title though. We talked all about the early days of COVID,

and I want to continue a little bit of that conversation today and then also try and cover

some other things that you do because you don't just do COVID obviously. Obviously not, no.

Yeah, can't make a living doing that. So let's start with summarized for us, why,

what are the the evidences that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into people at the

Huanan seafood market? Yeah, so I think there are a couple of pieces of key evidence that we have,

that will lead me and a number of people to think that. First of all, to me it's extremely clear

that the earliest cases were very strongly clustered spatially around that market.

The earliest cases we have date back to early December 2019, if you plot those cases on a map of Wuhan,

they strongly clustered around this market and the key thing is not, they're not just people who

were working at the market or living close to the market. They are people who have no relationship

to the market at all. Just random people who were sick, who attended hospital, who recovered,

and who gave their place of residence and that residence happens to be close to the market. So

this is a huge kind of central piece of force being pulled by the market. That is the center point

of the outbreak and it's simply no data of it starting anywhere else in this city. Now the lab,

the famous lab we will talk about, the Wernichirology is about 35K away from the market.

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