WHO team examine provincial disease control centre in China

A WORLD Health Organisation (WHO) team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has visited a provincial disease control centre in China that had an early hand in managing the outbreak.

The WHO investigators arrived in the Hubei provincial capital, Wuhan, last month to look for clues and have visited hospitals that treated many of the earliest patients and a seafood market where cases of infection with the then-unknown virus emerged in December 2019.

The team’s visit to the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control came amid tight Chinese controls on access to information about the virus. The country has sought to avoid blame for alleged mis-steps in its early response to the outbreak, while promoting alternative theories that the virus originated elsewhere and may even have been brought to Wuhan from outside China.

Following the visit, a member of the team, Peter Daszak, told reporters it had been a “really good meeting, really important”.

The evidence the team assembles will add to what is expected to be a years-long quest for answers. Pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir requires massive amounts of research, including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.

China has largely curbed domestic transmission through strict testing and contact tracing.