The Pangolin Possibility

The animal origin of the coronavirus remains a mystery

The animal origin of the coronavirus is an ongoing mystery. While bats are considered the most likely source of the virus, pangolins — small, scaly anteaters that are illegally trafficked for food and traditional medicine — have also been implicated in the spread of the disease.

Today, the journal Nature published an unedited manuscript from researchers in China that sheds some light on the role of pangolins in the ongoing crisis. (The paper was accepted and published early to disseminate information quickly.)

Pangolins, write the researchers, are capable of carrying viruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers detected these closely related viruses in 18 pangolins that had been smuggled into China. They note, however, that the viruses they detected in the pangolins are not similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 to definitively say that the animals are the elusive “intermediate hosts” in this outbreak.

Often when a virus spreads from animals to humans, it first jumps from the original animal to another species before finally being transmitted to humans. That animal go-between is the “intermediate host.” This paper can’t confirm that pangolins are intermediate hosts in the current outbreak — but it also doesn’t rule out that possibility.

So far, bats and pangolins are the only mammals known to be infected with a coronavirus…