A coronavirus pandemic existed in East Asia more than 20,000 years ago throughout China, Japan and Vietnam.

As COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 3.8 million people and an economic waste of billions of dollars, the ancient coronavirus is still visible in the DNA of people today, The New York Times reported.

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“The finding could have dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination,” the Times wrote.

“It should make us worry,” David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, told the Times. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.” 

In 20 years, there have been three coronaviruses that have gone viral: COVID-19, SARS and MERS, all of which jumped into our species from bats or other mammals. Four other coronaviruses can infect people, causing mild colds. Because coronaviruses have a regular mutation rate, scientists can estimate when they diverge from a common ancestor. Through that technique, the scientists estimated that HCoV-HKU1 arose in the 1950s while HCoV-NL63 dates back 820 years or so.

Enard and his team looked at human DNA to search for evidence left by other past coronaviruses. They examined genes known to respond to coronaviruses, and in certain East Asian populations they found 42 dominant versions. “That was a strong signal that people in East Asia had adapted to an ancient coronavirus,” the Times writes. 

The scientists estimated that the genes evolved their antiviral mutations between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago, most likely over the course of a few centuries, in response to an epidemic of a coronavirus. 

The scientists noted that those 42 genes may hold promise for developing antiviral treatments in the present day.

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