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About a year ago, the first COVID-19 patient was registered in Wuhan. To this day, almost nothing is known about him. There is also no clarity on the origin of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Beijing says it has not left China.
The first case of a mysterious new lung disease was registered in early January this year in the billionaire Chinese city of Wuhan. However, to this day, we know almost nothing about the so-called “patient zero”. Today, almost a year later and after 1.5 million deaths worldwide, China has its own theory about the origin of the new Sars-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease it causes.
For example, on Facebook, the People’s Gazette of China, a spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party, wrote a few days ago: “All available evidence indicates that the coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan.” The virus may have been discovered for the first time in this Chinese city, but it did not start there, an expert told the newspaper.
China targets India and Italy
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry made a similar statement last spring, who even admitted that the US military had introduced the virus into China. The spokesperson, meanwhile, used more moderate rhetoric, arguing that “tracing the roots of the virus is a dynamic process involving different countries and regions.”
Now, a new Chinese study concludes that the first cases of COVID-19 were found in India, not in Wuhan. Another controversial study, released by state media, cites Italy as the main source of infection.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called all these accusations “highly speculative”. Western experts are more inclined to believe that in this way China wants to polish its image and divert attention from the serious shortcomings that were made at the beginning.
Another version that circulates in China about the origin of the virus is that it was introduced into the country with imported frozen food. In this sense, controls on imported goods were later strengthened. Again, however, Western experts consider the risk of transmitting the virus through frozen foods to be minimal. Or, as Bremen virologist Andreas Dotzinger points out to German public and legal television ARD: “I exclude this option with more than 90 percent certainty.”
Conflicting data on the so-called “patient zero”
At the same time, international investigation into the origin of the infection is focused only on the Chinese city of Wuhan. However, to this day, it is unclear who was the first infected person. Some media reports point to three candidates for “patient zero”: a 55-year-old man from China’s Hubei province, who was infected in mid-November 2019; a shrimp vendor in the Wuhan market; another man who exactly 1 year ago, on December 1, 2019, showed symptoms of the disease for the first time.
It is also unclear how the virus was transmitted from an animal, probably a bat, to humans. This is exactly what an international team of WHO experts are trying to study, interviewing the first patients and carefully examining all the circumstances surrounding the Wuhan market: what exactly was sold to you when the infection broke out and where did the infection come from? product.
Why is Beijing delaying the investigation?
So far, Beijing has not taken seriously the study of the origins of the infection by independent experts. WHO’s first such mission last February brought next to nothing, especially since experts were not allowed to enter the market in Wuhan. Since May, the WHO has been trying to send a second such mission, and this time Beijing has promised to cooperate more actively. But there is still no agreed date when the ten members of the expert group can arrive in China.
China
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