A much-anticipated report from the WHO international mission to Wuhan to investigate COVID-19’s origins is set to be published this week, following intense US and Chinese pressure over its contents.
The pandemic has engulfed the planet, killing more than 2.65 million people and shredding the global economy since the first cases emerged in the Chinese city late in 2019.
Since then, scientists have developed multiple vaccines to fight the disease — but the mystery at the very heart of the pandemic remains unsolved.
It was only in January that a team of international experts assembled by the WHO finally visited Wuhan to start a month-long investigation.
The WHO mission was aimed at finding clues as to how COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans.
Now, another month on after leaving Wuhan, the team and its Chinese counterparts are set to issue their findings.
While global leaders want immediate answers, uncovering the exact origin of an pandemic takes time — and is sometimes never found.
Nonetheless, the mission members, drawn from a range of fields and disciplines, are upbeat.
“I’m convinced we’re going to find out fairly soon. Within the next few years, we’re going to have real significant data on where this came from and how it emerged,” British zoologist Peter Daszak, one of the team members, said on Wednesday last week.
Experts believe that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, originally came from bats and jumped into humans via an intermediate animal.
However, samples from tens of thousands of wild, domestic and farm animals in the region revealed no trace of the coronavirus.
The scientists are also uncertain as to where and when the outbreak started, though the Wuhan cases remain the earliest known.
That said, the mission has produced a number of hypotheses.
“There was conduit [back] from Wuhan to the provinces in south China where the closest relative viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are found in bats,” Daszak told an event hosted by Britain’s Chatham House think tank last week. “It provides a link and a pathway by which a virus could convincingly spill over from wildlife into either people or animals farmed in the region, and then shipped into a market. That’s a really important clue.”
The team also did not rule out transmission through frozen meat.
Virologist Marion Koopmans, a Dutch member of the team, said that while transmission of the coronavirus could potentially happen through infected people touching frozen food products, “the origin most likely is not the outside of the package.”
However, she and her colleagues said frozen wild meat from neighboring provinces remained a “very valid option.”
The idea of a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — a hypothesis promoted by former US president Donald Trump — is “the least likely on the list of our hypotheses,” Koopmans said.
Back in Geneva, Switzerland, in the face of clouds of suspicion that continued to hang over the mission, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that all hypotheses remained on the table and promised transparency over the report.
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