Medical personnel in protective suits perform nucleic acid testing in a small area in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, where the outbreak of the Chinese Communist virus is at its worst, May 15, 2020.
World health Organization (WHO) investigators, looking into the origins of the Chinese Communist virus (Wuhan pneumonia), found that the virus may have spread widely in Wuhan well before December 2019. They said they hope the Chinese Communist authorities will allow them to examine up to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from Wuhan blood donors to get to the bottom of the origin of the virus.
In an exclusive interview with CNN, Peter Ben Embarek, the lead investigator for the WHO mission, said that after examining infected samples, more than a dozen different strains of the virus were already present in Wuhan in December 2019. Moreover, the first person officially claimed by the Communist Party to be infected was an office worker in his 40s with no noteworthy travel history.
“He has no connection to the (South China Seafood) market,” Embarek told the outlet, “and we have talked to him. His Life – in a way – is very uneventful and normal, no hiking in the mountains or anything like that. He was an office worker for a private company.”
WHO experts are concerned that the CCP virus likely spread in China long before it first officially appeared in mid-December.
Embarek added that Chinese scientists briefed the WHO team on the 174 cases found in Wuhan and surrounding areas in December 2019. Of these, 100 cases have been confirmed as infected through laboratory tests, and another 74 cases were confirmed through clinical diagnosis of the patient’s symptoms, he said.
Embarek said those cases were likely only the severe cases noted by Chinese doctors, meaning the disease may have infected more than 1,000 people in Wuhan by December of that year.
Of the infected population, he said, “about 15 percent ended up as severe cases, while the vast majority were mild cases.”
Embarek said that through their access to genetic samples, 13 different strains of the virus were found to have emerged locally in Wuhan in December 2019. He said these sequences, when studied with broader patient data from China throughout 2019, could provide geographic and temporal clues to the outbreak prior to December.
Variations in viral gene sequences are common and usually harmless as they spread before different individuals. The discovery of so many different variants may indicate that it has been spreading for a longer period of Time.
Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, said, “Since genetic diversity was already present in the SARS-CoV-2 sequences sampled from Wuhan in December 2019, it is likely that the virus had been spreading for some time, before December.”
Holmes said, “These data are consistent with other analyses where the virus emerged in humans earlier than December 2019, with a period of insidious transmission before the virus was first detected in the South China market.”
Embarek said the WHO team hopes to return to Wuhan in a few months to investigate.
In the next round of research, he said, the team hopes to obtain samples that were not available for the current investigation, particularly from the Wuhan blood donor bank, in part dating back two years.
“There are about 200,000 samples there that are now sealed and available for a new round of research.” Embarek said.
However, the use of these samples will require the cooperation of the Chinese Communist authorities.
“We understand that these samples are extremely small samples and are only used for litigation purposes,” he said, “and there is no mechanism to allow the use of these samples for routine research.”
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