WHO says virus may have jumped to humans before it appeared in Wuhan
A team looking into the origins of Covid-19 has concluded its mission in China, the World Health Organisation said.
It said it was preparing to send more experts to Wuhan, the central city where the outbreak was first reported late last year. “The WHO advance team that travelled to China has now concluded their mission to lay the groundwork for further joint efforts to identify the virus’s origins,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the UN health agency, said on Monday.
“Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to identify the potential source of infection of the early cases.”
He said “evidence and hypothesis” generated from the work would lay the ground for further, longer-term studies.
But Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief, said the research may yet show that Wuhan was not the initial site of transmission from animals to humans.
“One must remember that there was a specific surveillance system in place in Wuhan for picking up clusters of atypical pneumonia,” he said.
“It was there for a very specific purpose. And the fact that the fire alarm was triggered doesn’t necessarily mean that that is where the disease crossed from animals into humans,” he said.
The comments came amid an increasingly heavy toll from the pandemic in the US, India and Brazil, as investigators seek to clarify the origins of the virus and how it may have jumped from animals to humans last year.
“The real trick is to go to the human clusters that occurred first and then to work your way back systematically looking for that first signal at which the animal-human species barrier was crossed,” Dr Ryan said.
“Once you understand where that the barrier was breached, then you move into the studies in a more systematic way on the animal side.”
The WHO did not provide details of the terms of reference, say whether they would be made public or indicate how big the international team would be or when it could be sent to China.
It said team members had extensive discussions with their Chinese counterparts during the three-week visit, and had spoken by video to virologists and other scientists in Wuhan – including those working at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
US President Donald Trump in April said he had seen evidence to support the theory
that the virus had originated from the lab.
On Sunday, Dr Deborah Birx, Washington’s most senior adviser on the pandemic, said the virus was “extraordinarily widespread” in the US and infections in urban and rural parts of the country marked a “new phase” for the pandemic in the country.
Dr Ryan, asked to comment on such remarks, said he did not believe the intention was “to create a sense of a new phase ... but to really remind all states that the disease never went away.”
“It’s not our job to tell the US what it should be doing at sub-national level – the statebased planning and implementation guided by the national scientists seems to be [on] the right path,” Dr Ryan said.
“The difficulty for us all is, sometimes we know the right path. The difficulty is choosing to walk it.”
An international team from the UN agency spoke to virologists and other scientists in the central Chinese city