Fluhan from Wushan: What is the straight scoop?

When you need to get the whole story, who do you turn to? The many different news outlets and the amount of information circulating create a hodgepodge of conflicting stories.  Add to that the poor journalism (i.e., Yahoo News, Huffpost) and any accompanying bias and the news becomes more like the buffet spread at a Vegas restaurant--you pick and choose what is news.  Journalists once staked their reputation on their work.  But in our day of anonymity, or in some cases, fake journalists, its difficult to know who you can trust.

There are "different" stories circulating about the Wushan virus--what I will call "Fluhan" (for the purpose of identification this coronavirus as different and distinct from the previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS and the cold/flu like symptoms associated with it).  Fluhan by most accounts was contracted from the Huanan seafood market in Wushan sometime in late December.  Another account pushes the timeline back further to November and states that it was not contracted from exotic animals from the market since one of the first Chinese who contracted Fluhan had no contact with the market.  Some may even go so far as to call it biological terrorism to inflict damage to the Chinese economy because of the trade/tax issues with the U.S. (for all those conspiracy theorists out there).  And I'm sure there are many more stories that contribute to the disinformation.  So who do we get the straight scoop from? 

At least we are not left in the dark regarding the virus.  Most of that information can be found in medical journals.  The past outbreaks originated from animal hosts (a topic that will be dealt with in a forthcoming post).  MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) is believed to come from camels; SARS-Cov (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) is believed to come from civet cats (which looks less like a cat and more like a raccoon).  The origin of both is thought to bats; the mutated virus in its host is the cause of the cross-species transmission.  One recent study claims the origin of the 2019-nCoV ("Fluhan") originated in snakes (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.25682).

For now, it's a waiting game here in China.  We are on lock-down (all of our apartment block exits are closed except for one and the government is dissuading any gathering of people--even for church) waiting for news to return to life as usual--unless the narrative changes and the virus turns people to zombies.