And while many believe the virus originated at a fish market in Wuhan, China, Garry said that is also a misconception.
"Our analyses, and others too, point to an earlier origin than that," Garry said. "There were definitely cases there, but that wasn’t the origin of the virus."
"There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level," Dr. Robert Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study, told ABC News, "so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin."
And while many believe the virus originated at a fish market in Wuhan, China, Garry said that is also a misconception.
"Our analyses, and others too, point to an earlier origin than that," Garry said. "There were definitely cases there, but that wasn’t the origin of the virus."