The former President of the United States, Donald Trump, had accused a laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, of letting the virus escape from its facilities and being the origin of the pandemic.
WUHAN CHINA (El Pais) – The WHO considers the coronavirus’s passage from animal to human via a third species as the “most likely” hypothesis for the origin of covid and suggests that it did not originate in the Wuhan market. At the end of their mission, this was stated at a press conference by the experts of the WHO international team. For almost four weeks, they have investigated in the city where the first cases of the pandemic were detected how the disease could have arisen.
The head of the international experts who traveled to this city in central China, Peter Ben Embarek, made this clear at the beginning of his speech at the press conference. Although new information has been found, this investigation has not substantially changed the picture of what is known about this disease, which has already infected more than 100 million people worldwide.
The experts worked with four hypotheses, as explained by the head of the international experts, Peter Ben Embarek: direct transmission from an animal, probably a bat; the indirect route, through a third species; contagion from viruses on frozen surfaces; and that the virus escaped from a laboratory. The experts have found that only the latter is “extremely improbable,” which is why they have ruled out pursuing this line of research.
The former President of the United States, Donald Trump, had accused a laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, of letting the virus escape from its facilities and being the origin of the pandemic.
That’s the only hard-hitting conclusion they have advanced. The rest of the questions – what animal could have been the intermediary of transmission, how it arose in Wuhan, was it there where the jump to humans occurred, or was it elsewhere – remain open. “There is not enough evidence (…) to determine whether Sars-Cov-2 spread in Wuhan before December 2019,” said Liang Wannian of the Chinese National Health Commission and head of the delegation of Chinese scientists.
Ben Embarek noted that the investigation points to “a natural reservoir” of bats as the original animal, although it is unlikely that the jump was made in the city.
