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About a year ago, the first patient was treated for Covid-19 in Wuhan, China. To this day, little is known about him and the origin of the new coronavirus. Beijing is delaying independent investigations.
By Ruth Kirchner, ARD-Studio Beijing
About twelve months ago, the first case of a mysterious new lung disease was discovered in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. Little is known about the supposed “patient zero”. Today, one year and almost 1.5 million deaths worldwide, China is spreading its own narrative about the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease it caused.
“All the available evidence indicates that the coronavirus did not start in Wuhan, in central China,” a spokesman for the Communist Party said in a Facebook post in the “People’s Daily” a few days ago. The virus was the first to be discovered in Wuhan, but it did not come from there, an expert quoted by the newspaper said.
China sees the origin of the virus in India or Italy
Beijing Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who even assumed in the spring that the US military had introduced the virus into China, made a very similar statement. Now he’s a bit more cautious: “Virus tracking is an evolving process in possibly several countries and regions.”
New Chinese research now claims to have identified the first cases of Covid 19 in the Indian subcontinent, and not in Wuhan. Another controversial study, which is also widely cited in China’s state media, concerns Italy.
The World Health Organization (WHO) only says that everything is “very speculative.” Rather, Western experts suspect that China wants to polish its image and divert attention from its own failures a year ago.
Did the virus come out of the freezer?
And then there are frozen imports. They have also been held responsible for introducing the coronavirus into China for weeks, after which import controls were tightened. Companies should immediately implement their contingency plans if coronavirus is found in imported food or packaging to disrupt transmission routes, says Sun Wenjian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Transportation.
However, Western experts consider the risk of transmission of the virus through frozen food to be minimal. For example, Bremen virologist Andreas Dotzinger says: “Well, I would do more than 90% to prevent this from happening.”
Contradictory references to “patient zero”
Therefore, international investigations into the origin of the pandemic continue to focus on Wuhan. It has not yet been clarified who was “patient zero”. In media reports, a 55-year-old man from Hubei Province, who is said to have been infected in mid-November 2019, a shrimp seller from the wholesale market in Wuhan, and a man who on 1 December 2019, exactly one year ago, said first symptoms developed.
It’s also unclear how the virus spread from animals, presumably bats, to humans. This is exactly what a team of international specialists should investigate on behalf of the WHO in Wuhan and interview the first patients again, explains WHO expert Peter Ben Embarek in a briefing on social media. “We should also take another look at the famous wholesale market where the first cases were discovered,” says Embarek. “We should look at everything that was sold in this market to find out where the products, the animals and the food came from.”
Beijing delays independent investigation
China hasn’t really encouraged independent research so far. A first WHO mission in February brought little in – the experts weren’t even allowed to visit the wholesale market. WHO has been working on a second mission since May. Beijing agreed to cooperate more this time, a date for the trip of the 10 experts has not yet been set.
