WUHAN (CHINA) – A World Health Organization-led team of experts investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic started meeting Chinese scientists on Friday. The WHO said the group has plans to go to labs, markets and hospitals in Wuhan.
On Thursday, the team’s two weeks of quarantine got over after its arrival in China, thereby moving to a lakeside hotel in the central Chinese city where the deadly virus first emerged in late 2019.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, tweeted on Friday, “First face to face meeting with our colleagues. Correction: facemask to facemask given the medical restrictions. Discussing our visiting programme.”
“China teamleader prof Wannian joking about some technical glitches. Nice to see our colleagues after lengthy zoom meetings,” she said.
The group is expected to spend two more weeks in China, and will visit the seafood market, which was marked as the centre of the early outbreak. It will also visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One hypothesis, rejected by China, is that the reason for the outbreak was through a leak at the government lab.
The WHO has sought to manage expectations. “There are no guarantees of answers,” its emergency chief, Mike Ryan, said earlier this month.
Thea Fischer, a Danish member of the team, told on Thursday, “It is important to remember that the success of this mission and origin-tracing is 100% depending on access to the relevant sources.”
“No matter how competent we are, how hard we work and how many stones we try to turn, this can only be possible with the support from China,” she said.
The origin of COVID-19 has been highly politicised.
The investigating team had been planned to arrive in Wuhan earlier in January, and the fact that China delayed their visit led to a rare public criticism from the head of the WHO, which former US President Donald Trump accused of being “China-centric”.
China has pushed the idea that the virus emerged abroad before being identified in Wuhan, with state media highlighting the presence of the virus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers saying it had been circulating in Europe in 2019.
China’s foreign ministry has also implied that the sudden closing down of a US army laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland in July 2019 had connections to the pandemic.
Yang You, a 30-year-old Wuhan resident, said, “At the early stage in China, it was a burden particularly for Wuhan people when everyone was calling it a Wuhan virus, which was humiliating. If it could be traced to the source clearly, in my opinion, it could clear either China’s or Wuhan’s name.”