GENEVA, Switzerland
The World Health Organisation has entered the final stages of the search for the origins and exact source of Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2), which has so far killed over 1.3 million people and infected over 55 million worldwide.
On November 10, the international health agency
released its plan to identify the origins of the virus and how it first crossed
over to humans in China, where the outbreak was first reported.
The Chinese government remains guarded about
this information.
The WHO has faced harsh criticism, especially
from the Trump administration for not moving quickly enough with the probe. The
UN agency first started the investigation mission in mid-February, when the
world still hoped that the new coronavirus could be contained.
In May, more than 130 WHO member states,
including China, passed a resolution that included a call for the inquiry with
several countries pressing for the investigation to start.
“Building on the recommendations from the 73rd
World Health Assembly, WHO, together with the government of China, are setting
up an international multidisciplinary team to design, support and conduct a
series of studies that will contribute to origin tracing work,” the dossier
said.
In July, a three-week scoping mission, in which
two WHO experts travelled to China, laid the groundwork for the larger
investigation that was quietly released. The larger mission of international
experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, had been
expected to start its investigation in “a matter of weeks” after that, the WHO
said in July. However, these plans stalled.
According to the report, some countries
retrospectively identified cases of Covid-19 weeks before the first case was
officially notified through surveillance, and unpublished reports of positive
sewage samples could suggest that the virus may have circulated undetected for
some time. The WHO team aims to explore how the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 might
have started, gather evidence from the cluster of cases identified in December
2019 for potential links and clues to its origin.
The search will start in Wuhan — the Chinese
city where the virus was first identified — and expand across China and beyond.
According to the report, an international team
of epidemiologists, virologists, and researchers with expertise in public
health, animal health, and food safety will lead the WHO’s Covid-19
investigation. The agency has not released their names.
For Covid-19, the researchers will study
samples from before and after the time the coronavirus outbreak was publicly
declared in late December 2019.
“An outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause was
identified through surveillance in Wuhan, however the possibility that the
virus may have silently circulated elsewhere can’t be ruled out,” the report
said.
It is widely assumed that the virus originally
came from bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between
bats and humans remains unknown. Scientists believe the killer virus jumped
from animals to humans, possibly from a wet market in the city of Wuhan city,
in the province of Huanan.
In Wuhan, researchers will take a closer look
at the Huanan meat and animal market, which was closed after many of the first
people diagnosed with Covid-19 were found to have visited. Early investigations
sampled frozen animal carcasses at the market, but found no evidence of
SARS-CoV-2, according to a November 5 report of the WHO mission’s terms of
reference.
However, environmental samples, taken mostly
from drains and sewage, tested positive for the virus.
“Where an epidemic is first detected does not
necessarily reflect where it started,” the WHO report said, noting that
preliminary reports of viral RNA detected in sewage samples before the first
cases had been identified.
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