The World Health Organization has revealed it will finally be sending a team to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus.
More than a year since Covid-19 was first detected in China, experts will look at how it started and whether learnings can be made to avoid something like this in the future.
They’ll be trying to find out how the virus jumped from animals to humans and whether it developed in Wuhan or was brought there by a dead animal and spread at a place like a wet market.
Scientists have suggested bats could have been the culprit, however haven’t ruled out other animals.
The crack team from The WHO will consist of 10 people and they’ll be working with Chinese scientists for four to five weeks.
Fabian Leendertz, a biologist at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, has joined the team and has told the Associated Press it will be brilliant if they can locate the origin and source of the virus.
“It’s really not about finding a guilty country,” Leendertz said. “It’s about trying to understand what happened and then see if based on those data, we can try to reduce the risk in the future.”
He adds the team hasn’t been told of any restrictions when they arrive in China, except for a two-week mandatory quarantine at the start.
Leendertz said Chinese scientists have already sourced a bunch of samples that will prove vital in the hunt for the origin and source of the coronavirus.
“There will be a report from that mission, but I’m pretty sure that (it) will not give the full answer,” he said, adding that further research will likely be necessary,” he said.
“X-rays from the hospitals – we now know quite well what COVID-19 patients look like…So that could also be a hint.”
“The big scope is to try to find out what happened. How the virus jumped from which animal to perhaps an intermediate host and then to humans. To reconstruct the scenario.”
“The more you know about why these spillover events happen, the better you can also check if there are countermeasures you can take to prevent such transmissions in the future.”
The team will be setting off in January.
Credit: LB
