Chinese researchers have claimed that coronavirus originated in India, in the latest attempt by academics to pin blame for the pandemic outside their borders. A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences argues coronavirus likely originated in India in summer 2019. They say,it came jumping from animals to humans via contaminated water, before travelling unnoticed to Wuhan, where it was first detected. It is not the first time that Chinese authorities have pointed the finger of blame elsewhere suggesting, largely without evidence, that both Italy and the US could be the site of the original infection.

Their unproven theory goes on to say: "The water shortage made wild animals such as monkeys engage in the deadly fight over water among each other and would have surely increased the chance of human-wild animal interactions. We speculated that the [animal to human] transmission of SARS-CoV-2 might be associated with this unusual heat wave.

However, The World Health Organisation is currently looking for the source of coronavirus in China, while the body of scientific evidence suggests the disease originated there. In their paper, the Chinese team use phylogenetic analysis - a study of how a virus mutates - to attempt to trace the origins of Covid-19. The scientists argue that it should therefore be possible to track down the original version of the virus by finding the sample with the fewest mutations. They say that using this method rules out the virus found in Wuhan as the 'original' virus, and instead points to eight other countries: Bangladesh, the USA, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia or Serbia.

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