By BRUCE SCHREINER and CLAIRE GALOFARO

MAYFIELD, Ky. (AP) — Workers, volunteers and members of the National Guard fanned out in areas of Kentucky slammed by a series of tornadoes to begin the long process of recovery, including replacing thousands of damaged utility poles, delivering bottles of drinking water and continuing to search for the dead.

The tornado outbreak Friday that killed at least 88 people in five states — 74 of them in Kentucky — cut a path of devastation that stretched from Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed, to Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center was heavily damaged.

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said the death toll could grow as authorities continued to work around debris that slowed recovery efforts. Nearly 450 National Guard members have been mobilized in the state, and 95 of them are searching for those presumed dead.

“With this amount of damage and rubble, it may be a week or even more before we have a final count on the number of lost lives,” the governor said.

Kentucky authorities said the sheer level of destruction was hindering their ability to tally the damage. Still, efforts turned to repairing the power grid, sheltering those whose homes were destroyed and delivering supplies.

Across the state, about 26,000 homes and businesses were without electricity, according to poweroutage.us, including nearly all of those in Mayfield. More than 10,000 homes and businesses had no water as of Monday, and another 17,000 are under boil-water advisories, Kentucky Emergency Management Director Michael Dossett told reporters.

A fund set up by the state collected $6 million in donations, according to the governor. Kentucky First Lady Britainy Beshear launched a Christmas toy drive for children affected by the storm. She is asking for unwrapped toys, books, and gift cards of $25 that will be distributed to families in need.

State and local officials said it could take years for some of the hardest-hit areas to fully recover.

“This again is not going to be a week or a month operation, folks. This will go on for years to come. This is a massive event,” Dossett said.

Five twisters hit Kentucky in all, including one with an extraordinarily long path of about 200 miles (320 kilometers), authorities said.

In addition to the deaths in Kentucky, the tornadoes also killed at least six people in Illinois, where the Amazon distribution center in Edwardsville was hit; four in Tennessee; two in Arkansas, where the nursing home was destroyed and the governor said workers shielded residents with their own bodies; and two in Missouri.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced Monday that it has opened an investigation into the collapse of the Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

Mayfield, home to 10,000, suffered some of the worst damage. Debris from destroyed buildings and shredded trees covered the ground in the city. Twisted sheet metal, downed power lines and wrecked vehicles lined the streets. Windows were blown out and roofs torn off the buildings that were still standing.

Not far from Mayfield, a church serving as a shelter in Wingo said it expected to host more than 100 people Monday night.

Glynda Glover, 82, said she had no idea how long she would stay at the Wingo shelter: Her apartment is uninhabitable since the wind blew out the windows and covered her bed in glass and asphalt.

“I’ll stay here until we get back to whatever normal is,” she said, “and I don’t know what normal is anymore.”

On the outskirts of Dawson Springs, another town devastated by the storms, homes were reduced to rubble and trees toppled, littering the landscape for a span of at least a mile. Jack Whitfield Jr., the Hopkins County judge-executive, estimated that more than 60% of the town, including hundreds of homes, was “beyond repair.”

“A full recovering is going to take years,” he said.

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Schreiner reported from Dawson Springs, Kentucky. Associated Press writer Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.

By CLAIRE GALOFARO

MAYFIELD, Ky. (AP) — Judy Burton’s hands shivered as she gazed up at what had been her third-floor apartment. She could see her clothes still hanging in the closet, through the building’s shredded walls. Across the street, her church was boarded up. A few blocks away, the spire was ripped away from the town’s grand courthouse, its roof caved in. The restaurant where neighbors met for lunch, too, was lost in the rubble.

She clasped her hands together and tried to quiet their quivering. Burton and her dog had narrowly escaped as a tornado hit her town, part of an outbreak of twisters across the Midwest and South. Now, she stood among the grind of heavy machinery clearing the wreckage of landmarks, businesses and homes of Mayfield, population 10,000.

“It’s gone. It’s terrible, just terrible, I’m shaking,” she said. “It’s going to take me awhile to settle my nerves.”

Burton can’t imagine a single family here not mourning. Theirs is the sort of town where everyone is connected to everyone else. Mayfield was one of the worst-hit towns in the unusual mid-December spate of tornadoes, and Burton looked around at a disorienting jumble of boards and bricks and broken glass.

Hundreds of buildings have been reduced to nothing. Roofs are sheared off those that stand. Some streets are littered with snapped trees, clothes, chunks of insulation and blown-away Christmas decorations. The fire station is inoperable, most police cars destroyed.

At least eight people working at a Mayfield candle factory were killed, and eight more are missing. It’s still unclear how many others in Mayfield died. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear had feared more than 100 dead statewide, but on Sunday afternoon he scaled back that estimate to as low as 50, with many at the candle factory accounted for.

Burton worries for her neighbor and her little dog. They’re feared among the dead, as they were probably unable to escape as the walls collapsed around them.

Burton and others evacuated in the middle of the night. She harnessed her dog, grabbed a neighbor by the hand and herded them to the elevator toward the basement. About 15 people there cried, screamed and prayed for protection as the wind blew open locked doors.

Down the hall, Johnny Shreve had been watching the storm approach from his window. Lightning crashed, and in that split second of brightness, he realized that their town would not be the same come morning: He saw an office building across the street disintegrate. Then he dove onto his kitchen floor as chunks of concrete pelted his body.

“It felt like everything in the world came down on me,” he said.

He lay there for more than an hour, trying to dig himself out and shouting for his neighbors and his Shih Tzu, Buddy. Finally, Shreve broke through into the living room. There was Buddy, trying to scratch toward him from the other side.

He posted on Facebook that they were alive, and added: “Y’all pray for Mayfield.”

“It blew my mind when the sun came up,” Shreve said, when he and others returned over the weekend to salvage what they could and traded stories of survival in the parking lot. “I don’t see how this town can recover. I hope we can, but we need a miracle.”

In the nearby town of Wingo, more than 100 people took shelter at a church — babies, people in their 80s and 90s, family pets. Everyone has a story, a reason they have nowhere else to go.

Meagan Ralph, a schoolteacher volunteering to coordinate the shelter, pulled up an aerial photo of Mayfield, her hometown, on her phone. She zoomed in, seeking a landmark to orient herself.

“I can’t recognize it, it’s not recognizable,” she said. “I can’t even identify what I’m looking at, it’s that bad.”

But she has found hope at the shelter. Donations have poured in. Volunteers from surrounding counties came in droves. People from Mayfield take care of each other, she said.

As the news spread of the horrors at the candle factory on the night of the storm, hundreds of ordinary people arrived at the factory to help, braving slippery rubble until authorities told them to go home, said Stephen Boyken, who’s a chaplain there. That spirit is part of the fabric of Mayfield, he said: “If you’re off in a ditch, there’s somebody going to stop by, probably three or four trucks try to get you out and help you.”

By the time the sun came up, they were lined up at churches and school gymnasiums to give piles of clothes and coats, food and water.

“We will recover, absolutely.” Ralph said. “We’re small but mighty.”

She looked around the shelter, and noted that the task before them is extraordinary, with hundreds of their neighbors now with nothing and nowhere to go.

Wanda Johnson, 90, ended up here after she was evacuated from the same apartment building where Burton escaped. Johnson’s windows burst, and she clung to her doorframe, pleading: “Dear God, help me, please help me get out of here.”

At the shelter with her son and granddaughter, she wonders what will become of them now.

“They tell me we don’t have a town,” Johnson said. “Everything’s gone. It’s just wiped away. It just flipped over our city.

“We don’t know where we’re going to go — we don’t know what’s left to go to.”

By LAURA UNGAR

AP – Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus tormenting the world remains shrouded in mystery.

Most scientists believe it emerged in the wild and jumped from bats to humans, either directly or through another animal. Others theorize it escaped from a Chinese lab.

Now, with the global COVID-19 death toll surpassing 5.2 million on the second anniversary of the earliest human cases, a growing chorus of scientists is trying to keep the focus on what they regard as the more plausible “zoonotic,” or animal-to-human, theory, in the hope that what’s learned will help humankind fend off new viruses and variants.

“The lab-leak scenario gets a lot of attention, you know, on places like Twitter,” but “there’s no evidence that this virus was in a lab,” said University of Utah scientist Stephen Goldstein, who with 20 others wrote an article in the journal Cell in August laying out evidence for animal origin.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who contributed to the article, had signed a letter with other scientists last spring saying both theories were viable. Since then, he said, his own and others’ research has made him even more confident than he had been about the animal hypothesis, which is “just way more supported by the data.”

Last month, Worobey published a COVID-19 timeline linking the first known human case to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were sold.

“The lab leak idea is almost certainly a huge distraction that’s taking focus away from what actually happened,” he said.

Others aren’t so sure. Over the summer, a review ordered by President Joe Biden showed that four U.S. intelligence agencies believed with low confidence that the virus was initially transmitted from an animal to a human, and one agency believed with moderate confidence that the first infection was linked to a lab.

Some supporters of the lab-leak hypothesis have theorized that researchers were accidentally exposed because of inadequate safety practices while working with samples from the wild, or perhaps after creating the virus in the laboratory. U.S. intelligence officials have rejected suspicions China developed the virus as a bioweapon.

The continuing search for answers has inflamed tensions between the U.S. and China, which has accused the U.S. of making it the scapegoat for the disaster. Some experts fear the pandemic’s origins may never be known.

FROM BATS TO PEOPLE

Scientists said in the Cell paper that SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is the ninth documented coronavirus to infect humans. All previous ones originated in animals.

That includes the virus that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic, which also has been associated with markets selling live animals in China.

Many researchers believe wild animals were intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2, meaning they were infected with a bat coronavirus that then evolved. Scientists have been looking for the exact bat coronavirus involved, and in September identified three viruses in bats in Laos more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses.

Worobey suspects raccoon dogs were the intermediate host. The fox-like mammals are susceptible to coronaviruses and were being sold live at the Huanan market, he said.

“The gold-standard piece of evidence for an animal origin” would be an infected animal from there, Goldstein said. “But as far as we know, the market was cleared out.”

Earlier this year, a joint report by the World Health Organization and China called the transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal the most likely scenario and a lab leak “extremely unlikely.”

But that report also sowed doubt by pegging the first known COVID-19 case as an accountant who had no connection to the Huanan market and first showed symptoms on Dec. 8, 2019. Worobey said proponents of the lab-leak theory point to that case in claiming the virus escaped from a Wuhan Institute of Virology facility near where the man lived.

According to Worobey’s research, however, the man said in an interview that his Dec. 8 illness was actually a dental problem, and his COVID-19 symptoms began on Dec. 16, a date confirmed in hospital records.

Worobey’s analysis identifies an earlier case: a vendor in the Huanan market who came down with COVID-19 on Dec. 11.

ANIMAL THREATS

Experts worry the same sort of animal-to-human transmission of viruses could spark new pandemics — and worsen this one.

Since COVID-19 emerged, many types of animals have gotten infected, including pet cats, dogs and ferrets; zoo animals such as big cats, otters and non-human primates; farm-raised mink; and white-tailed deer.

Most got the virus from people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says that humans can spread it to animals during close contact but that the risk of animals transmitting it to people is low.

Another fear, however, is that animals could unleash new viral variants. Some wonder if the omicron variant began this way.

“Around the world, we might have animals potentially incubating these variants even if we get (COVID-19) under control in humans,” said David O’Connor, a virology expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re probably not going to do a big giraffe immunization program any time soon.”

Worobey said he has been looking for genetic fingerprints that might indicate whether omicron was created when the virus jumped from humans to an animal, mutated, and then leaped back to people.

Experts say preventing zoonotic disease will require not only cracking down on illegal wildlife sales but making progress on big global problems that increase risky human-animal contact, such as habitat destruction and climate change.

Failing to fully investigate the animal origin of the virus, scientists said in the Cell paper, “would leave the world vulnerable to future pandemics arising from the same human activities that have repeatedly put us on a collision course with novel viruses.”

‘TOXIC’ POLITICS

But further investigation is stymied by superpower politics. Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University said there has been a “bare-knuckles fight” between China and the United States.

“The politics around the origins investigation has literally poisoned the well of global cooperation,” said Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “The politics have literally been toxic.”

An AP investigation last year found that the Chinese government was strictly controlling all research into COVID-19′s origins and promoting fringe theories that the virus could have come from outside the country.

“This is a country that’s by instinct very closed, and it was never going to allow unfettered access by foreigners into its territory,” Gostin said.

Still, Gostin said there’s one positive development that has come out of the investigation.

WHO has formed an advisory group to look into the pandemic’s origins. And Gostin said that while he doubts the panel will solve the mystery, “they will have a group of highly qualified scientists ready to be deployed in an instant in the next pandemic.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.