WUHAN, China (AP) – A World Health Organization team quarantined Thursday in the Chinese city of Wuhan to begin fieldwork on a research mission on the origins of the virus that caused the pandemic COVID-19.
The investigators, who had to complete 14 days of quarantine after arriving in China, left their quarantine hotel and boarded a bus in the mid-afternoon.
The mission has been politically charged as China tries to avoid blaming the alleged missteps in its first response to the outbreak. One of the main issues is where the Chinese will allow the researchers to go and with whom they will be able to talk.
Yellow barriers blocked the hotel entrance and kept the media at bay. Before investigators boarded, workers with full protective gear could be seen loading luggage onto the bus, including two musical instruments, a dumbbell and four yoga mats.
Hotel staff said goodbye as investigators boarded the bus and possibly headed to another hotel. The bus driver was wearing a full-length white protective suit. Investigators wore face masks.
Earlier this month, former WHO official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the Wuhan team, warned that no progress was expected, and said it could be years before conclusions could be reached. firm about the origin of the virus.
“It’s been over a year now since it all started,” he said. “A lot of the physical evidence will go away. People’s memories are inaccurate and the physical design of many places will probably be different from what they were and how people move, and so on.”
Among the places they could visit is the Huanan Seafood Market, which was linked to many of the early cases, as well as research institutes and hospitals that cared for patients at the height of the outbreak.
The mission only came after a considerable dispute between the two sides that sparked a rare WHO complaint that China was taking too long to make final arrangements.
China, which has strongly opposed an independent investigation that it could not fully control, said the matter was complicated and that Chinese medical staff were concerned about new virus clusters in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities.
Although the WHO was criticized at first, especially by the United States, for not being critical enough of the Chinese response, it recently accused China and other countries of moving too slowly at the start of the outbreak, gaining a rare admission from the side. Chinese that could have been better.
Overall, however, China has strongly defended its response, possibly out of concern for reputational or even financial costs if it is found to be missing.
“The WHO and world experts have fully affirmed the success of China’s epidemic prevention and tracing work from past origins,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday. “Both sides have a basic consensus on cooperation in research related to origins and related work is progressing smoothly.”
Chinese officials and state media have tried to question whether the virus even started in China. Most experts believe it came from bats, possibly in southwest China or neighboring areas of Southeast Asia, before moving on to another animal and then humans.
The source search will try to determine exactly where and how this happened.
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Associated Press photographer Ng Han Guan contributed to this report.