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GENEVA: Anchoring the source of the COVID-19 pandemic should help determine how COVID-19 has “invaded the human species” so quickly, a senior official at the World Health Organization told AFP.
The outbreak has sparked a fierce diplomatic dispute between China and the United States, with the WHO at the center of the line.
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In late March, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, reached an informal truce in the war of words on the origin of the deadly disease.
But it broke down quickly. Trump has been accusing Beijing of being slow to alert the world to the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and he openly suspects that China is covering up an accident at the eastern city’s virology laboratory.
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Away from the dispute across the Pacific, Sylvie Briand, WHO’s director of infectious risk management, said knowing the origin of the virus was crucial “to understanding how it has evolved.”
“It is a virus of animal origin transmitted to humans. Therefore, we must try to understand how the adaptation of this virus allowed it to invade the human species,” he told AFP in front of the WHO headquarters in Geneva.
VIRUS “PING PONG”
The first cases of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, were reported in late December in Wuhan.
Since then, the pandemic has infected more than four million people worldwide and has claimed nearly 300,000 lives.
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Many researchers believe that the new coronavirus comes from bats, but passed through another species before being transmitted to humans.
“The virus multiplied in these animals, changed a little as it did, and ultimately resulted in a type of virus” that is transmissible to humans, said Briand, who in 2009 spearheaded the WHO influenza program during the pandemic of ” swine flu “H1N1 2009..
Re-tracing the origin of the virus, discovering the intermediate hosts, “would prevent the phenomenon from reoccurring and prevent ping-pong transmission” between humans and animals.
“Every time it jumps from one species to another, the virus can mutate a little,” said the French scientist.
“That can have an impact on treatments, it can become resistant, while vaccines may not be effective enough.”
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For now, there are still many unknowns, even though “thousands upon thousands of samples” have been taken, in particular from “many animals on the market in Wuhan”, but also from dogs in Hong Kong, Briand said, stressing that the analysis will take time.
The samples are taken by WHO member states, but the United Nations health agency “encourages them to share information with each other” to speed up the investigation.
CHANGING THE ALERT SYSTEM
The United States and Australia have called for an international investigation into the origin of the virus.
More diplomatically, the WHO has asked Beijing to invite them to investigate the source.
Shortly thereafter, in early May, China proposed establishing a commission under the auspices of WHO to assess the “global response” to COVID-19, and only after the pandemic ends.
Chinese authorities insist that the WHO World Health Assembly or its executive board, the two main organs of the UN agency, which organize their annual meetings next week, must pre-sign the plan.
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Briand said the meetings should also focus on the need to “refine” the WHO health alert system, which only allows the organization to declare whether there is a global emergency or not, while the previous procedure had six stages, and the last was to declare a pandemic.
“We need to find a system that can trigger alerts so that people can prepare,” he said.
“But at the same time we have to tell them if it is imminent or if it will arrive in a few weeks or months, and tell them more precisely what they need to be prepared for.”
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