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The search for clues by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, China, has apparently not been as fruitless as initially assumed. The aim of the group of experts was to investigate the origin of the Covid 19 pandemic. Beijing first put all possible obstacles in the way of scientists. After long delays and many comings and goings, WHO experts have just returned from China. Now the mission presents explosive investigation results.
WHO researchers have found evidence that the December 2019 outbreak in Wuhan was much broader than previously thought. Experts assume that the virus spread in China long before its first official appearance in mid-December 2019. WHO calls for urgent access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from Wuhan. This should help decipher the propagation paths. Until now, the Chinese have blocked this access.
According to Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO mission, his team of experts in Wuhan found several signs of a wider spread in 2019. Furthermore, it can be assumed that there were more than a dozen different strains of the coronavirus in Wuhan already in December 2019. Embarek has just returned from Wuhan to Switzerland to the WHO headquarters in Geneva. Speaking to CNN, he said: “The virus was already widespread in Wuhan in December 2019, which is a new finding.”
More than 1000 cases in December 2019
Despite disruptive maneuvers by the Chinese: Little by little, individual pieces of the puzzle seem to confirm the scientists’ concerns. That the new lung disease could have spread in China long before the first official appearance in mid-December. Meanwhile, the virus has already been detected in Italy and on other continents. But Wuhan appears to be the epicenter of the global pandemic. After the huge virus outbreak in January 2020, which the Chinese authorities could no longer hide, Covid-19 spread like wildfire across the world.
The Chinese had presented 174 serious cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan to WHO specialists in December 2019. It can therefore be assumed, according to Embarek, that the disease could have infected more than 1,000 people even then. According to the models, about 15 percent of those infected would end up as severe cases and the vast majority as mild cases. According to Embarek, this gives the estimated number of cases of more than 1000 corona infections in Wuhan at that time.
Requires access to blood samples
For the first time, researchers were able to detect 13 different genetic sequences of the pathogen Sars-CoV-2 from blood samples collected in December 2019. Therefore, the sequences could provide valuable information about the timing of the outbreak before December 2019. 2019 and the propagation routes. The discovery of so many different possible variants of the virus suggests that it has been around longer than last December.
According to Embarek, there were no accumulations of infections at first. The first official corona patient in China, an office worker in his 40s, was randomly infected. While the Wuhan fresh markets were originally considered ground zero for the pandemic, China’s first patient “has no connection to the markets,” Embarek said. “We spoke to him. He leads an orderly and normal life. No travel or anything like that. He was an office worker in a private company.”
The WHO team hopes to return to Wuhan in the coming months to continue the investigations. There are no specific dates for a confirmed trip, so Embarek. His team wanted to be able to examine blood samples “urgently”, which was not possible on the first trip. Around 200,000 blood samples are stored in Wuhan: “It would be great if we could work with them.” (kes)
