Geneva:
An international group of authorities due to travel to China subsequent month to probe the animal origins of Covid-19 will go to Wuhan and will carry out their investigation freely, the WHO mentioned Friday.
Asked about the international mission, which WHO has been working for months to get to China, World Health Organization emergencies chief Michael Ryan told reporters the authorities have been anticipated to travel “in the first week of January”.
“There will be quarantine arrangements, obviously, we have to. As ever, we will have to comply with whatever the arrangements are for risk management in travel on arrival and in China itself,” he mentioned.
A year into the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has killed almost 1.7 million persons and infected close to 75 million globally, the query of exactly where the virus came from and how it initial crossed more than from animals to humans remains a mystery.
The WHO has for months been working to send the group of 10 international authorities, such as epidemiologists and animal well being specialists, to China.
The UN well being agency sent an advance group to Beijing in July to lay the groundwork for the international probe.
But till this week it had remained unclear when the bigger group of scientists would be in a position to travel to China to commence epidemiological research to attempt to determine the initial human situations and their supply of infection.
There had been issues about irrespective of whether the authorities would be permitted to travel to Wuhan, exactly where the virus initial surfaced final December.
– Not ‘under Chinese supervision’ –
But Ryan insisted Friday that when the authorities would of course pass by way of Beijing, there was no doubt “the team will visit Wuhan”.
“That’s the purpose of the mission,” he mentioned.
“The purpose of the mission is to go to the original point at which human cases were detected, and we fully expect to do that.”
He also bristled at a query about irrespective of whether they would be working “under Chinese supervision” when in China.
“It’s a team of international experts with international renown, (who) will work with our Chinese colleagues,” he mentioned.
“They will not be… supervised by Chinese officials.”
“We will operate as we would operate in any member state, at their invitation, with gratefulness for their support to that and with the full intention of pursuing the scientific principles that this organisation has always stood for,” he insisted.
WHO, he mentioned, would “provide all the support necessary” to the group “in order to find and learn more about the origin and source of this virus.”
Scientists initially believed the killer virus jumped from animals to humans at a industry promoting exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan, exactly where the virus was initial detected late final year.
But authorities now believe the industry may well not have been the origin of the outbreak, but maybe rather a spot exactly where it was “amplified”.
It is broadly assumed that the virus initially came from bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it among bats and humans remains unknown.
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