What info can Wuhan market offer to WHO?

Expert team scheduled to see places where cases were linked, talk to merchants

For residents who live near the Huanan Seafood Market in Hankou district of Wuhan, their ritual of buying food and fruits from there in preparation for the Spring Festival holiday has to be altered this year. Since being suspended on January 1, 2020, the market, which was closely linked to the first batch of patients infected with the novel coronavirus in China, has been sealed off for a year.

It is expected to see the WHO expert team soon. After a 14-day-quarantine in Wuhan, the team of 13 scientists, on the mission to study the origins of the coronavirus starting Friday, have scheduled to visit Huanan Seafood Market and local hospitals and have face-toface meetings with Chinese scientists in Wuhan.

Peter Ben Embarek, who

Exactly one year ago when World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global public health emergency to alert countries of the risk of the disease, China had reported more than 9,000 cases, while outside China, there were only 83 cases reported in 18 countries and regions, including one in the US.

When countries turned a deaf ear to the warning of Ghebreyesus and a lot more in the following months, the result is what we see today: global confirmed cases have topped the 100 million mark and the pandemic hit 191 countries and regions, with the world’s No.1 economy topping the list in both the number of confirmed cases and deaths.

A year later, as the world starts to look forward with hope, we really need to rethink WHO’s role in a public health crisis, and questions have been raised for a year, such as “Did WHO mishandle the pandemic?” “Has it turned into a ‘Chinese health organization?’” and “How should it be reformed?”

Target of the West

A recently published COVID-19 response report by an independent panel criticized the WHO for being “underpowered to do the job expected of it,” and questioned why the WHO’s Emergency Committee did not meet until the third week of January in 2020 and did not declare an international emergency until its second meeting on January 30.

Chen Xi, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University, told the Global Times that the WHO was dealing with a new virus, and decisions made amid uncertainties were difficult, and that the epidemic began to worsen in China in late December to early January, coinciding with the Christmas and New Year holidays in the West, which impeded a timely response.

According to the WHO’s timeline on its COVID-19 response, it tweeted that there was a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan on January 4 and provided detailed information to its member states and advised them to take precautions to reduce the risk on January 5, 2020.

Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital, told the Global Times that the window of controlling the disease was still open for the world when the WHO made the declaration, and it’s a pity that not all countries actively responded to the WHO’s appeal.

Compared to the scientific questions and critics, the WHO was lashed out harder by the West for “bending to China’s might” and “helping China hide the outbreak.” “Western countries led by the US, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, used the pandemic as a tool to contain China’s growing influence and forced the WHO to be their accomplice. The WHO cautiously avoided jumping into the trap of Western politicians and maintained its independence, which made it the target of the West,” Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times.

Wang said that China was the only country inviting WHO experts for origin-tracing international cooperation last February and July.

Chinese experts said that China has played a prominent role in cooperating with the WHO, and member states have to take concrete measures to reform the WHO to make it more efficient, and its role strengthened but not undermined.

“The WHO cautiously avoided jumping into the trap of Western politicians and maintained its independence, which made it the target of the West.”

Li Haidong A professor at China Foreign Affairs University

Photo: AP Peter Ben Embarek (center) of the World Health Organization research team passes by Chinese doctors during a visit to the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, also known as the Hubei Province Xinhua Hospital, in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province on Friday.

Photo: Xinhua UN Secretary-General António Guterres receives his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in the Bronx, a few miles uptown from the UN Headquarters in New York.