"Once In 1,000 Years": Top Medical Body Quotes Chinese Theory On COVID-19

ICMR said the Chinese study shows coronavirus spread to humans from bats.

The country's top medical body on Wednesday said that a research study in China has shown that the coronavirus strain at the heart of the global COVID-19 pandemic is a mutated form of its variant found in bats.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that the study shows that the deadly virus may have infected humans either directly from bats or it may have been transmitted from bats to pangolins and then humans.

"As per a research in China, it was found that coronavirus might have mutated in bats so as to infect humans," said ICMR's head scientist Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar.

"There is also a possibility that bats might have transmitted it to pangolins, and from pangolins it got transmitted to humans," he said.

"The event of coronavirus transmitting from bats to humans happens once in a thousand years. When some virus changes species, that is a rare event," Dr Gangakhedkar.

Medical experts across the world are divided on theories about how the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which triggered the 2019 outbreak dubbed COVID-19, spread to humans.

Calling for more research, many scientists have rejected the theory that the virus emerged in humans in late 2019 from a wet market in China's Wuhan that sold pangolins.

More than 20 lakh people across the world have been affected by COVID-19. The number of confirmed cases in India stands at 11,933 including 392 deaths.

The ICMR also said that they have found no instance of coronavirus jumping from bats to humans in India.

"At the time when the Nipah virus occurred, we started an investigation on the Indian animals to see which all have the ability to spread such kind of virus," Dr Gangakhedkar told news agency ANI.

"We found that there are two types of bats, and they carried coronavirus which was not capable of affecting humans," he said.