A year before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, the World health Organization said Wednesday that an international team of experts investigating the source of the coronavirus will travel to China in January, but did not say whether it would go to wuhan, the city where the virus first appeared.
Who spokesman Hedinn Halldorsson confirmed to AFP what had been reported earlier by several experts: “I can confirm that experts will be heading to China in January to investigate the source of the novel Coronavirus.”
The spokesman did not provide further details on the mission’s mission. But several senior WHO officials have repeatedly expressed the hope that the mission will travel first to Wuhan, China, where the epidemic is seen as a cradle, and then consider other possible tracks.
Ten experts from Denmark, The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Russia, Vietnam, Germany, the United States, Qatar, Japan and Australia are internationally recognized virus experts. Their mission is to investigate the origin of novel Coronavirus and to figure out how the virus came to be transmitted to humans.
On October 30, the WHO announced that it had held a video meeting with relevant Chinese experts on the mission to China, but did not propose any specific departure date, which drew much criticism.
The United States has publicly accused China of concealing the truth about the epidemic, the WHO has been too submissive to Beijing’s will, and other member states, though not as relentlessly critical of China as the United States, also suspect That Beijing is deliberately blocking international experts from traveling to Wuhan to investigate.
In July, Beijing agreed to allow several WHO experts to travel to China, but the experts stayed in Beijing for three weeks and were unable to make the trip to Wuhan. Earlier, an investigation by the New York Times noted that Beijing had finally agreed to allow WHO experts to investigate in China on the condition that Chinese experts would take control of key parts of the investigation.
Most scientists believe that novel Coronavirus was the original host of a bat. However, it is still unclear how the virus was transmitted to human through an intermediate host. Shortly after the outbreak of the Epidemic in Wuhan, some Chinese experts pointed out that pangolins were intermediate hosts, but this view does not seem to be generally accepted by scientists.
Scientists investigate the source of COVID-19 in order to understand the occurrence and development process of the virus, so as to achieve accurate prevention and avoid a new pandemic.
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