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The WHO (World Health Organization) mission in Wuhan, China, to investigate the start of the coronavirus pandemic found evidence that the disease had already begun to spread in December 2019, just before the country began to spread. extend. Report the first cases of covid- 19. The information is from an exclusive report from the North American network CNN.
The researchers note that the outbreak in December 2019 was already much larger than reported and they are now seeking access to thousands of blood samples in the Chinese city, which have not yet been released by the Chinese government for analysis.
WHO research leader Peter Ben Embarek told CNN that the mission found several signs that the outbreak was already large in 2019, establishing for the first time that there were about a dozen mutations of the virus circulating in Wuhan, the epicenter of the beginning of the pandemic. At the end of the year.
The group also spoke with the first patient the Chinese government said was infected, a 40-year-old man with no travel history and who was diagnosed with Covid-19 on Dec. 8.
The information has been slowly relayed to the WHO, adding concerns from other scientific studies about the origin of the pandemic, which indicated that the outbreak was already spreading before China’s first emergency measures.
“The virus was widely circulating in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding,” Embarek said.
The WHO received data that there were 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in December 2019. Of these, 100 were confirmed by laboratory tests and another 74 by clinical diagnoses of patients with symptoms.
Embarek told CNN that it is possible that, with the discoveries, the total number is even greater than what was known, reaching about a thousand cases in China, since “in the infected population, only about 15% end up being seriously ill. ” the rest are mild cases. “
The mission has 17 WHO scientists and 17 Chinese scientists and has found 13 different genetic sequences of Sars-Cov-2, which can help track the first cases and how the disease spread geographically.
“Some samples lead us to markets. Others don’t,” he said of the chances that local markets are linked to the outbreak.
Mutations
The discovery of the various strains in Wuhan may indicate that the coronavirus was already circulating even before this December 2019, and the findings of the WHO mission are the first to point, in fact, to this possibility.
“Given that there was already genetic diversity of Sars-Cov-2 in the 2019 samples from WUhan, it was likely already spreading well before this month in question,” said Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. “These data indicate that the virus had spread to humans before December and that it had a silent transmission for a period, before it was first detected in the Huanan market.”
Approximately 100 samples from patients with symptoms similar to covid-19 are investigated in October and November 2019, but it has not yet been confirmed if they had the coronavirus.
As for the “patient zero”, it is not connected to the Huanan market. “He has not traveled, he has a normal life and works in an office of a private company,” said Embarek.
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