Beijing: China, who is known as the country of origin of the deadly coronavirus, has been shifting its blame to other countries for the outbreak of the virus. The researchers from China have now claimed that the virus originated in our country, India.
Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences says that COVID-19 virus originated in India in the summer of 2019. They said the virus first was found in animals, which got transferred to humans via contaminated water.
It has then travelled to Wuhan, where it was detected for the first time.
The Chinese researchers have earlier blamed the US and Europe without any evidence. However, they have targeted India now due to the increased political tensions between India and China.
The Chinese researchers used phylogenetic analysis to trace the origin of the novel coronavirus.
The researchers argue that the method they used rules out the virus found in Wuhan as the original virus, and blamed eight other countries for the origin of the virus. The countries are Bangladesh, the USA, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, the Czech Republic, Russia and Serbia.
The unproven theory of the Chinese scientists says, "The water shortage made wild animals such as monkeys engage in the deadly fight over water among each other and would have surely increased the chance of human-wild animal interactions. We speculated that the [animal to human] transmission of SARS-CoV-2 might be associated with this unusual heatwave. India's poor healthcare system and young population allowed the virus to spread undetected for several months."
However, the deadly virus was first linked to a cluster of cases of 'pneumonia of unknown origin' at a seafood market in the Wuhan city.