‘A great example of team science’: Sask. virologist assists global study on origins of COVID-19

Angela Rasmussen was one of the scientists who spent a year researching where COVID-19 began. (University of Sask./David Stobbe)

A scientist at the University of Saskatchewan was part of the global team researching how COVID-19 began.

“It’s really a point of pride for me to be representing the only institution from Canada on that paper,” Angela Rasmussen told CTV News. “It is such an important paper.”

The team’s conclusions have been published in a Science journal article titled: The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rasmussen said the article took about a year to put together and was a team effort.

“Some of us knew each other, but we had originally gotten together sort of organically because there was a lot of misinformation going around about the origin of the virus.”

She said it was essential to know where and how COVID-19 started.

“We really want to use this information to prevent future pandemics. And it's really, really clear to me that this pandemic started much the same way that the original SARS Coronavirus epidemic started, and that was through the live animal trade,” she said.

“So what we really need to be thinking about going ahead is how do we mitigate this risk? Because there's clearly other SARS Coronavirus circulating in these animals. We need to understand a lot more about the circumstances that brought these animals to the market in the first place and the circumstances under which people are interacting with them.

“It's not just about finding how this pandemic started, it's also about preventing the next one.”

Rasmussen said the research had some challenges to overcome.

“It really did require a lot of detective work from all of us and kind of trying to go over the evidence that does exist and that is accessible, and then verifying it,” she explained. “Which is very challenging to do when you know none of us can actually go to China.”

She said the team gathered various kinds of data and information together including mobile phone data, hospital records and details on what types of animals were sold at the Wuhan market.

“We really had to do a lot of sleuthing and pull all of these different streams of evidence together.”

Their paper has gone through a peer review process and she said they are confident in the results.

“We were able to really piece all of these puzzle pieces together in a way that that painted a picture to us that was pretty conclusive,” she said.

“It was a great example of team science. And it was really a fantastic collaboration.”