Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

Where did the Sars-2 coronavirus pandemic actually begin? Conventional wisdom says the virus first made the jump from bats to humans at an open market in Wuhan, China and began spreading from there. But there are other possibilities, and recent reports have lent further credibility to the suspicion that it may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory, where it was genetically modified and accidentally released into the human population. Mathematical modeller Richard Kollár, however, thinks that unlikely. Having analysed the course of the pandemic since the beginning, he is not convinced the virus even originated in Wuhan at all. With food being wasted on a massive scale in Western countries - nearly a million tons a year in Slovakia alone - people have begun to explore unconventional ways in which they can begin to remedy the situation and reduce the amount of food being wasted. Romana Grajcarová reports on how activities with names like "dumpster diving" are becoming more appealing to people as awareness of this issue grows.