Australian scientists on the WHO expert panel investigating the origin of COVID-19 (Chinese Communist virus) believe the virus originated in China, although the WHO has yet to conclude that it did.
Professor Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist and infectious disease expert with the NSW Department of health, was the only Australian on the 14-member WHO team that travelled to Wuhan to investigate the outbreak and work to determine the source of the Epidemic.
“I think the epidemic started in China,” Professor Dwyer said in an interview with NineNews.com. “I think the evidence that the epidemic started in other parts of the world is actually very limited. There’s some evidence, but it’s not very convincing.”
Dwyer flew back to Sydney from China on Wednesday and is currently in quarantine at his hotel. He said the “most likely source” of the virus was bats before animals like cats passed it on to humans. “I think the outbreak in the Wuhan market was really an amplifying event. The virus had probably been spreading in the community for weeks before that.” He said.
Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO investigation team, said the mission had worked, although no conclusions had been reached. “Have we changed dramatically from what we had before? I don’t think so.” He said, “Have we increased awareness and learned more specifics? Certainly we have.”
The 14 scientists arrived in China on Jan. 14 and entered the community after 14 days in quarantine. During a busy two weeks, the team of virologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians and Food safety experts visited key sites associated with the outbreak. To date, the Chinese communist virus has killed 2.3 million people worldwide.
The investigation included the Wuhan South China Seafood Market, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Hubei Provincial Hospital.
Chinese scientists on the WHO investigation team believe that the virus may have been brought into China via packaged frozen food. Dwyer, on the other hand, believes there is “very limited” evidence that the outbreak originated outside China.
WHO experts said Tuesday night that the virus is most likely to have been transmitted from animals to humans. Professor Dwyer said one of the key differences is trying to agree on what happened before the outbreak in the Wuhan market.
“Some of the other evidence – genetic analysis of the virus, for example – would suggest that the virus may have been spreading since mid-November, early December of last year.” He said.
“We also know that the Chinese reported that the people who went to the hospital were very sick, but we know now – to be fair, they didn’t know (about the outbreak) at the Time. But we now know that the virus is spreading among other healthy people, so there must have been many more cases than were confirmed last December.”
Asked if he believed there would be a definitive conclusion about how the virus started, Dwyer said he hoped there would be. “In reality many of these outbreaks take years to resolve, so part of the WHO’s job is to recommend what kind of research is needed to address these issues in the next year or so.”
Australian Prime Minister Morrison was one of the first world leaders to call for an investigation into the origins of the outbreak, an action that sparked a diplomatic backlash from the Chinese Communist Party, whose government launched a more than $20 billion trade strike against half a dozen Australian industries.
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