Aussie expert among team to probe virus origins in Wuhan

AN Australian virus expert who has flown to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has said his team will be looking at events prior to one of the first known outbreaks at a Wuhan animal market.

Dominic Dwyer is a director at NSW Health Pathology and one of 15 global team members who have been sent by the World Health Organisation to try to find out how the virus began its devastating spread. He arrived in China last week and his team’s fieldwork will begin once a fortnight’s quarantine is over.

“The focus here is really on the very early cases of COVID-19 that occurred in Wuhan to try to identify where they might have picked up the infection,” Mr Dwyer told Channel 9’s Today yesterday.

The scientists will be looking at how the outbreak at a socalled wet market in the city of Wuhan was sparked.

It was identified as a likely breeding ground for the virus after a cluster was identified there in December 2019.

The connection between the market and the early coronavirus cluster led scientists to suspect the virus could have spread from an animal to humans, although experts still are not sure of its origins.

“(We are) really concentrating on the first few cases. Even before the outbreak in the wet market in Wuhan,” Mr Dwyer said.

“There were cases around beforehand, where did they come from? What sort of history did they have in terms of animal exposure, or other sorts of exposures that we haven't figured out?”

Understanding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic could help prevent the next pandemic, the WHO believes.

Mr Dwyer said China had been a welcoming host so far.

“We have been told that we will get access to what we want to, in terms of where we want to go and (what we want to) see,” he said.