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The coronavirus pandemic, first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, central China, covered the entire world and claimed more than 2.6 million lives. human lives and seriously disrupted the world economy.
Only 15 months later, science has developed a chain of vaccines against the disease, but the mystery of its appearance remains unanswered.
It was only in January this year that an international team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) finally visited Wuhan and launched a month-long investigation into the epicenter of the pandemic.
The WHO mission hoped to find answers on how the virus, which had previously likely spread between animals, could have spread to humans.
A month after the end of the work in Uhan, the team members and their colleagues in China plan to publish their findings. This report should help identify the most likely transmission routes, as well as which assumptions are least likely.
Track Search
World leaders want immediate answers, but discovering the specific source of an epidemic takes time, and sometimes it is never possible to identify it.
On the other hand, the members of the mission, representatives of various research areas, were optimistic.
“It just came to our attention then. Over the next few years, we will have really meaningful data on where it came from and how it came about,” said Peter Daszak, one of the team members, a British zoologist, last Wednesday.
On February 9, the team held a lengthy press conference in Uhane before departing, during which they sent clues as to what might be in the mission report.
According to experts, the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, was initially spread among bats and transmitted to humans through some intermediate carrier.
However, samples from tens of thousands of wild, domestic and farm animals showed no trace of the virus.
Researchers are also not sure where and when the outbreak started, although the cases of infection identified in Wuhan are the first known.
The most likely path
The researchers, on the other hand, raised several hypotheses.
“There has been a link between Wuhan and the southern provinces of China, where the closest SARS-CoV-2 viruses are found among bats,” Daszak said last week at an event organized by analytical center Chatham House, based in the United Kingdom.
“This provides a link and a way in which the virus is likely to be transmitted from wildlife, either to humans or animals raised in the region, which in turn have been transported to market,” he said. “It is a very important clue.”
The experts did not rule out the possibility that humans could have been infected through frozen meat. Beijing also supports the theory that the infection could have been brought in from abroad with packages of frozen meat.
Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, who also joined the group, said it might be possible to contract the virus if people with COVID-19 come into contact with frozen food, but added that the origin of the coronavirus is probably not “out of the box.” .
However, she and her colleagues said that transmission of the infection through frozen bushmeat from neighboring provinces remained a “very reasonable option.”
The assumption that the virus spread from a laboratory at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, backed by the administration of former US President Donald Trump, is “less likely on our list of hypotheses,” Koopmans noted.
This version was also not highlighted during a press conference in Wuhan.
However, with the cloud of suspicion still hanging over the previous mission, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyes said none of the assumptions had been ruled out yet and promised to ensure transparency in the report.
Power pressure
China and the United States have been in conflict both behind the scenes and in public over the next report.
Initially it was planned to publish a summary of the document first, followed by a main report, but this plan was abandoned at the end of February, although the WHO did not provide any specific explanation.
The White House, concerned that the summary could be published without supporting data, praised this latest decision and took credit.
In anticipation of the report, US and Chinese diplomats have repeatedly voiced their positions. One party called for greater transparency and the other argued that the WHO mission was only possible with Beijing’s agreement to cooperate on scientific issues.
Trump, for his part, accused the WHO of being a Chinese puppet.
When his successor, Joe Biden, came to power in January, Washington’s tone to the UN health agency changed, but the Americans continued to express fears about the WHO investigation and pressured Beijing to provide more information.
The pressure was not limited to the United States.
Walter Stevens, European Union ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, recently called for the investigation report to be “completely transparent” and to answer the questions “we all have.”
Mission members stated that they had been given access to all the places and people they needed.
But the team’s leader, Peter Ben Embarek, requested more data to allow for a more in-depth investigation.
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