Is the origin of the virus that important and why? Seems simple enough to me.
Yes it's important.
Read up ya wanker...
The Origin of COVID-19 and Why It Matters
The COVID-19 pandemic is among the deadliest infectious diseases to have emerged in recent history. As with all past pandemics, the specific mechanism of its emergence in humans remains unknown. Nevertheless, a large body of virologic, epidemiologic, veterinary, and ecologic data establishes that the new virus, SARS-CoV-2, evolved directly or indirectly from a β-coronavirus in the sarbecovirus (SARS-like virus) group that naturally infect bats and pangolins in Asia and Southeast Asia. Scientists have warned for decades that such sarbecoviruses are poised to emerge again and again, identified risk factors, and argued for enhanced pandemic prevention and control efforts. Unfortunately, few such preventive actions were taken resulting in the latest coronavirus emergence detected in late 2019 which quickly spread pandemically. The risk of similar coronavirus outbreaks in the future remains high.
In addition to controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, we must undertake vigorous scientific, public health, and societal actions, including significantly increased funding for basic and applied research addressing disease emergence, to prevent this tragic history from repeating itself.
In 2007, scientists studying coronaviruses warned: “The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV–like viruses in horseshoe bats… is a time bomb. The possibility of the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses… should not be ignored.”
1
Few paid attention following the disappearance of SARS after the initial outbreak in 2002. Now, 18 years later, COVID-19 has emerged as the deadliest respiratory disease pandemic since 1918, when the “Spanish” influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people.
2 We need to understand what happened so that we can prevent it from happening again, and be better prepared to contain similar pandemics at their outsets.
The agent of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was named after the genetically related SARS-CoV (more recently distinguished by some as SARS-CoV-1), which caused a deadly near-pandemic in 2002–2003.
3 Before 2019, neither SARS-CoV-2 nor its genetic sequences had ever been identified in viruses of humans or animals.
Even so, scientific research conducted over the last two decades provides clues about how and why the COVID-19 pandemic appeared. We must understand these critically important scientific findings, described in the following text, so that we can better address significant existential risks we will continue to face for the foreseeable future.
Viruses are compact nucleic acid packages of either DNA or (in the case of coronaviruses) RNA associated with proteins, and in some cases with lipids. Viruses are not living organisms and can only reproduce inside living cells susceptible to viral entry and with the capacity to replicate viral nucleic acids and translate nucleic acid signals into amino acids to build viral proteins. Viruses are therefore nonliving self-contained genetic programs capable of redirecting a cell’s machinery to produce more of themselves.
It follows that when a virus enters a human cell for the first time, it has very recently been transmitted from cells of some other host, that is, from another animal or, for example, an insect vector. Emergence of a pathogen between a vertebrate or an insect has been referred to as host-switching, sometimes described as a spillover event. Most of the human viral and nonviral infectious diseases that have existed for centuries—measles, influenza, cholera, smallpox (eradicated in 1980), falciparum malaria,
4 dengue, HIV, and many others—originated by animal-to-human host-switching.
5 The complex genetic events that underlie host-switching differ greatly from pathogen to pathogen, but general mechanisms have been recognized for many.
6–
9
Host-switching determinants prominently include social, environmental, and biological factors providing the opportunity for host–species interaction; shared host cell receptors; genetic distance between transmitting and receiving hosts; and characteristics and complexity of the viral quasi-species or viral swarm. (RNA viruses in particular are not transmitted to multiple cells as identical virions, but as collections of thousands of different genetically related virions. The ever-changing complexity of the viral swarm varies among species, genetically distinct but related individuals of the same species, and in single hosts over time.)
Studying animal viruses that have previously spilled over into humans provides clues about host-switching determinants. A well-understood example is influenza virus emergence into humans and other mammals.
2 Human pandemic and seasonal influenza viruses arise from enzootic viruses of wild waterfowl and shore birds. From within this natural reservoir, the 1918 pandemic “founder” virus somehow host-switched into humans. We know this from genetic studies comparing avian viruses, the 1918 virus, and its descendants, which have caused three subsequent pandemics, as well as annual seasonal influenza in each of the 102 years since 1918. Similarly, other avian influenza viruses have host-switched into horses, dogs, pigs, seals, and other vertebrates, with as yet unknown pandemic potential.
2,
10,
11 Although some molecular host-switching events remain unobserved, phylogenetic analyses of influenza viruses allow us to readily characterize evolution and host-switching as it occurs in nature.
2
Until recently, relatively little was known about coronaviruses, and research interest in these common cold viruses was minimal. Eighteen years ago, a previously unknown β-coronavirus named SARS-CoV suddenly emerged. Following its initial appearance in China it spread to 29 other countries, causing a near-pandemic and killing 813 of the 8,809 people with confirmed infection before being controlled by aggressive public health measures. It has not been seen since. In 2012, however, another previously unknown β-coronavirus named Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and closely related to SARS-CoV, emerged to cause high case-fatality human infections. Fortunately, this virus does not efficiently transmit between humans, and cases have been largely limited to the Middle East where its intermediary host, the dromedary camel, is present in relatively high numbers. In 2016, yet another novel bat-origin coronavirus, an α-coronavirus, emerged in China to cause a novel epizootic disease in pigs, termed swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV). And most recently, at least as early as late November 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was recognized and became the third fatal bat virus–associated human disease emergence and the fourth bat virus–associated mammalian emergence in 18 years. ...
... Understanding how COVID-19 emerged is of great importance. We now know that the viruses causing SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 are all members of enormous groups of bat coronaviruses distributed globally, and that many of these viruses are functionally preadapted to human emergence. This preadaptation can be thought of as “accidental” because it must have occurred in nature in the absence of human infection and does not rule out further human adaptation to enable pandemicity. Molecular mechanisms of preadaptation are not fully known, but are undoubtedly related to functional similarities between ACE2 receptors on the cells of numerous mammals (bats, humans, minks, cats, and other domestic and wild animals).33,34
entire article:
The COVID-19 pandemic is among the deadliest infectious diseases to have emerged in recent history. As with all past pandemics, the specific mechanism of its emergence in humans remains unknown. Nevertheless, a large body of virologic, ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov