COVID-19 probe: WHO team begins fieldwork in Wuhan

Wuhan (China), Jan 30: A World Health Organization (WHO) team of 13 scientists began its investigation work into the origins of the COVID-19 yesterday after concluding a 14-day quarantine in central China's Wuhan city.

 

The WHO team visited a Wuhan hospital on Friday as they first went to the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, one of the first hospitals that had treated patients in the early days of the outbreak. The team met Chinese officials Friday and then left their Wuhan hotel in a fleet of cars, trailed by a media pack reflecting the intense global scrutiny on a visit whose aim is to establish how the virus was transferred from animals to humans.

 

 

The WHO said the team will later head to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Huanan market, and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control laboratory, three sites now indelibly linked with the pandemic.

 

The WHO investigation has been delayed, and there are fears over access and the strength of evidence a year after the virus emerged in the central Chinese city. It said that the team requested "detailed underlying data" and planned to speak with early responders and some of the first COVID-19 patients.

 

Having said that, the WHO's emergency director Michael Ryan sought to downplay expectations of finding the origin of the pandemic straight away. Success "is not measured necessarily in absolutely finding a source on the first mission," he told a news conference in Geneva.

 

"This is a complicated business, but what we need to do is gather all of the data, all of the information, summarise all of these discussions, and come to an assessment as to how much more we know about the origins of the disease and what further studies may be needed to elucidate that."

 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a news conference in Beijing that the WHO and Chinese experts are working together to trace the origin of the virus.

 

The first clusters of Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan in late 2019. China has since reported more than 89,000 cases and 4,600 deaths, with new cases largely concentrated in its north-east, where local lockdowns and travel restrictions were being imposed to contain the outbreaks.