Though COVID-19 was first reported in China, it does not mean that it originated in China. Ignorance needs to be overcome with science and prejudice with cooperation. The purpose of finding the virus source is to enable humans to defeat the virus and to avoid repeat of the same mistakes. Any attempt to put a label on the coronavirus is to despise science and common sense. 

A New York Times article, Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show, on April 8, said researchers have suggested the coronavirus was circulating in New York in mid-February as genetic analysis showed that the virus came to the area mainly from Europe. A separate team at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases, the report said. 

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on April 8, Peter Forster, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, said according to research by him and his team, the first human infection of COVID-19, referred to as SARS-CoV-2 in the paper, took place between September 13 and December 7, 2019.  

Forster's paper creatively applied "phylogenetic network analysis," which he usually uses to analyze human origins, to finding the virus origin. After mapping out 160 genetic samples from across the world, he found three major types of SARS-CoV-2, namely A, B and C. The A type, being the first type to infect humans, is widely seen in Europe and America but is not so common in East Asia. And the B type, which is the most common type in East Asia, seemed to be largely locked in the region, partly because people in other areas may have better resistance against it. The C type is found in significant proportions outside East Asia, and that again is, in Europeans and Americans. 

The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and a senior expert on international studies