COVID-19 was probably not a biological weapon and most US analysts believe it was not genetically engineered at all, but a final conclusion on the virus’ origins is impossible without cooperation from China, a declassified US report said.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday released its long-awaited public findings on the virus’ origins — a declassified version of the secret report submitted to US President Joe Biden earlier this year.
The intelligence community remains divided on where the outbreak began, but believes two causes are plausible — that it spread through animals to humans or that it sprang from an incident at a lab in Wuhan, China.
Photo: AFP
“China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19,” the report said. “Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States.”
The report sets out key outstanding questions, including information about the earliest cases of COVID-19, Chinese hospital occupancy rates and information on animals traded on Wuhan markets.
Meanwhile, China on Friday recorded its highest number of new daily COVID-19 infections in more than six weeks.
Nationwide, 59 new locally transmitted infections were reported, the Chinese National Health Commission said yesterday, up from 48 a day earlier.
It was the highest number of new local infections since Sept. 16.
Most of the cases were in northern China, with infections reported in Heilongjiang Province, Inner Mongolia, Gansu Province, Beijing and Ningxia.
There were no new deaths, leaving the death toll unchanged at 4,636.
Although the tally is tiny compared with infections elsewhere in the world, recent widespread outbreaks have forced officials to toughen restrictions, squeezing the service sector, including tourism and catering companies.
China’s border towns, faced with a higher risk of infection from overseas and with relatively few resources, have tended to experience more severe disruptions than richer cities.
In Inner Mongolia, the government in Ejina Banner, a remote administrative division on China’s border with Mongolia that went into lockdown last week, said it would transfer more than 9,400 stranded travelers to low-risk areas in the coming days, the official China Daily reported.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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