WHO team to start virus origin probe
Fact-finding mission out of quarantine in Wuhan, likely to visit Huanan wet market
BEIJING: As the 13-member World Health Organization (WHO) team stepped out of a two-week quarantine in Wuhan on Thursday to begin probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus, a motley group of Chinese citizens will be tracking their activities and statements.
They want answers - primarily, why was there a delay last January in making the information public that a contagious virus was spreading in Wuhan?
Zhang Hai, 51, thinks he lost his father to the deadly infection because that critical piece of information was missing when he brought the senior citizen for a leg surgery from Shenzhen to Wuhan last January.
Zhang hopes he will get an opportunity to talk to the WHO team - a prospect which is increasingly looking bleak after he and other disgruntled family members of victims were blocked out of Chinese social media to begin with.
The itinerary of the 13 WHO experts, expected to be here for two weeks under global glare, wasn’t revealed by the Chinese foreign ministry on Thursday. It is expected they will interact with scientists and doctors, and visit the Huanan seafood market linked to the first cases.
Zhang said when he reached and admitted his father to a hospital on January 17, nobody told him about the virus - by January 17 at least one person had died from the disease. Zhang’s father died from the disease on January 30 after slipping into a coma. Since then, he has been trying to get some answers.
“I openly advocated to pursue the responsibility of Wuhan authorities on Weibo. But my Weibo account was censored. Wuhan authorities covered up the epidemic… The cover-up was deliberate murder, I think,” he said. The family’s lawsuits were not accepted by the court, Zhang said.
Meanwhile in the US, the state of South Carolina reported two cases of a new coronavirus variant that was first detected in South Africa - the first cases found in America.