Although the Chinese side has been emphasizing that the tracing of the outbreak is a scientific issue and should not be politicized, the Wuhan-based WHO investigation team was given a tour of the “Wuhan Anti-Epidemic Achievement Exhibition” on Saturday, which was designed to highlight the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
According to international media, the Chinese side arranged for the WHO team to visit the “Wuhan Anti-Epidemic Achievement Exhibition” just after visiting the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan on January 30. In the report, AFP noted that the exhibition, which has been in place since October last year, was designed to publicize the health authorities’ “excellent emergency response” in the early stages of the epidemic and to highlight the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in the fight against the unprecedented epidemic.
Earlier, the WHO investigation team visited two hospitals in Wuhan to speak with frontline health care workers from the earliest days of the outbreak, including the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, which focused on treating patients with new crowns in the earliest days of the outbreak and whose medical history is of great importance for epidemiological tracing.
Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the investigation team, tweeted after visiting Jinyintan Hospital that the experiences she heard from health care workers at the hospital were “very similar” to those she heard from European intensivists. Peter Daszak, a member of the investigation team from the United States, also tweeted that visiting the hospital was an important opportunity to interact with frontline health care workers at the height of the outbreak.
The WHO said on its Twitter account that all hypotheses of the origin of the virus are the goal of the investigation team, which will follow science to explore the origin of the new coronavirus.
But French media sources say the investigation mission has been highly politicized. Beijing has been trying to divert attention from its slow response in the early stages of the outbreak by throwing around claims such as “the outbreak could also have originated abroad”.
As the WHO team’s itinerary was not made public, a large number of media vehicles tried to follow their convoy as they left the hotel to find out where they were visiting, according to a BBC correspondent reporting from Wuhan. “The WHO team can now make face-to-face visits on the ground, but their main task is to analyze the work already done in China, not to conduct their own research,” the BBC report said.
French media reported that disclosure relied entirely on snippets of information from WHO headquarters as well as the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and that the media were not allowed to follow the WHO team into the hospital for filming.
International experts said the process of tracing the source of the new coronavirus is complex and could take years to complete.
A Jan. 30 BBC report said China has been promoting the idea that the new coronavirus existed abroad before it was discovered in Wuhan, with official media often reporting heavily on the discovery of the virus on imported frozen fresh packaging or some scientific papers claiming the virus had spread in Europe in 2019.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also implied that the sudden closure of the US Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland (USA) in July 2019 was linked to the outbreak.
However, the scientific community believes that the virus Family with the closest genome sequence to the new coronavirus remains the bat coronavirus from southern China.
The Chinese government also strictly controls research on traceability, and the release of data and papers must be approved by authorities, according to the Associated Press.
A Wuhan resident was quoted in the BBC report as saying “It was a burden in the early days of the epidemic in China, especially for Wuhan people because everyone called it the Wuhan virus, which is a shame,” Yang, 30, a Wuhan resident, told Reuters. “In my opinion, if we can clearly trace the source, we can clear the stigma of China or Wuhan.”
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