WUHAN, CHINA — NPR reports that a W.H.O. research team traveled to China in January to probe how the Covid pandemic first started. <br /><br />A rash of theories have been spread about the origin of the virus, including that it escaped from a Wuhan lab. <br /><br />However, the W.H.O. investigators say they found that the virus likely passed from bats in southern China, to animals in wildlife farms, and then to humans. <br /><br />These wildlife farms take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and breed them in captivity. <br /><br />Some of these farms were likely supplying such wild animals to vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where early cases of COVID-19 were discovered last year. <br /><br />The wildlife farms are part of a project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years to lift rural populations out of poverty. <br /><br />However, China shut these farms down in February 2020, likely because the government thought that they were part of the transmission pathway from bats to humans.
