Geneva, Switzerland:
The World Health Organization’s international mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 will discover all avenues and is not hunting to uncover “guilty” parties, a group member told AFP.
Investigators will head to China in January and to Wuhan, exactly where the initial circumstances had been detected 12 months ago in the pandemic that has swept the planet, causing giant international overall health and financial crises.
“The meetings we had so far with Chinese colleagues were really productive and very good,” mentioned Fabian Leendertz from the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s central illness handle body.
“My impression, at the moment, is that the Chinese — on the government, but also on the population level — they’re really interested in finding out what happened.”
Leendertz, 48, is an professional in zoonoses — infectious ailments that cross the species barrier — and is amongst 10 eminent scientists tasked by the WHO with attempting to uncover the origins of the novel coronavirus and work out how it jumped from animals to humans.
A year just after the initial cluster was detected in Wuhan, they will travel to China for the initial time on a mission anticipated to final involving 5 and six weeks — the initial two spent in quarantine.
The 10 scientists will also be accompanied by Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO professional on meals security and zoonoses.
“This is not about finding a guilty country or a guilty authority,” mentioned Leendertz. “This is about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”
Leendertz mentioned that viruses jump from animals to humans just about every year, all more than the planet.
“It was just bad luck that this was such a nasty virus,” the German mentioned.
“Follow the tracks”
“We are starting in Wuhan because this is where the most solid first data are available,” mentioned Leendertz. “From there we follow the tracks wherever they take us.”
While he acknowledged that “the fresher the tracks are, the better,” educated vet Leendertz mentioned that even a year on it was “still possible to narrow down the scenario”.
He added that all avenues remained open in terms of scientific evaluation.
An epidemiologist and an animal overall health specialist from the WHO went to China in July on a scoping mission to lay the groundwork for the broader international investigation.
Since the finish of October, the 10 specialists have held normal virtual meetings with Chinese scientists working along the very same lines.
Leendertz cautioned that “we should not have the expectation that after this first visit to China sometime in January, the team will come back with conclusive results”.
However, he hopes the group will return from China with a “concrete plan” for Phase Two of the investigation, which will appear at what else was necessary to pinpoint the transmission occasion exactly where the virus jumped from animal to a human.
Question of time
Leendertz explained that the “biggest part” of the work, in certain the “practical” fundamentals, would be carried out by Chinese specialists.
The international mission is “there to support” them and also “give transparency to the rest of the world”.
While scientists usually think that bats had been the original host species of the virus, the intermediate animal involving bats and humans is not however identified.
Leendertz mentioned the group would go “back in time” by examining a variety of human swabs kept by the Chinese authorities, and serum collections from blood donors to see if persons had been exposed to the virus just before the initial cluster was recorded in December 2019.
Another strategy will be to figure out the part played by the Wuhan wet marketplace, exactly where reside exotic animals had been purchased and sold.
The professional in the epidemiology of extremely-pathogenic micro-organisms mentioned he was “pretty sure we will find out somehow what happened”.
But he mentioned an answer “may take some time”, with no time frame place on the investigation.
In the meantime, he hoped that politics would remain “as far as possible” from the mission.
Outgoing US President Donald Trump accused China of covering up the initial outbreak, and branded the WHO as a puppet of Beijing.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)