The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is supposed to be the epicenter of the pandemic and it is thought that the first person who contracted the infection, 55-year-old man from Hubei province may have caught the virus from such wet markets.
Recent research suggests that the current strain of coronavirus seems to have emerged from wet markets are places that sell fresh meat, fish and produce and other perishable items. Often these markets are crowded spaces where live and dead animals are sold at proximity. This increases the chance for contamination of raw produce with deadly pathogens that can shed from live animals through bodily fluids, skin or fur. In China, the wet market was also a hub for illegal wildlife trade and there were animals such as pangolins, pythons, bears, etc being sold. The coronaviruses are zoonotic diseases that are transferred from animals to humans. The strain of virus SARS-CoV-2 responsible for the current pandemic seems to point at both bats and pangolins as host. In China, pangolin scales are used for traditional medicine and the meat is a delicacy. Recent reports also found out that Malayan pangolins that were smuggled to china showed the presence of the virus. A similar trajectory is responsible even in the case of the SARS epidemic in which bats were found to be the original host.
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Even in the case of SARS wet markets were the source from where the virus emerged. Although researchers are yet to confirm the exact pathway that the virus may have taken and the intermediate animals responsible for the final transfer to humans, they accept that wildlife trading must be stopped.
With no vaccination insight or effective medicines, the pandemic is still far from over. Researchers, medical experts, and conservationists have called for a ban on wet markets, but the country continues to operate these markets