Chinese scientists say that COVID-19 most likely came from people.

CNN said that a Chinese doctor said that people may have been where the COVID-19 virus came from.

Tong Yigang of the Beijing University of Chemical Technology said that the genetic sequences of viral samples taken from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, which is thought to be the center of the pandemic, were “almost identical” to those of patients infected with the coronavirus. This suggests that COVID-19 may have come from humans.

At the news conference, Tong said that between January 2020 and March 2020, more than 1,300 samples of the environment and frozen animals had been taken from the market. From the environmental samples, researchers had found three strains of the virus.

He thought that “recent studies that said racoon dogs were the source of the COVID-19 virus did not have enough evidence to back them up.”

The Chinese State Council held the press conference to talk about the study into where COVID-19 came from.

Zhou Lei, a researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asked scientists all over the world to help find out where the COVID-19 virus came from. He said, “The site where COVID-19 was first found was not necessarily where it came from.”

China was criticized for not letting foreign investigators try to find out where COVID-19 came from.

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it still didn’t have important information from China about how the outbreak started. The head of WHO’s program on emerging diseases said that this lack of information was just unacceptable.

China, on the other hand, has denied all of the claims and said again that it has been open and honest with the WHO and the other inspectors.

The question of where COVID-19 came from became the center of attention last month when the US Department of Energy said that the virus was probably caused by a mistake in a lab and spread all over the world.

But the US agency also marked it as a decision with “low confidence.”

On Saturday, Zhou said it is “extremely unlikely” that the virus came from a Chinese lab because of an accident. He said this was in response to the idea that the lab had a leak.