Members of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited another Wuhan hospital on Saturday that had treated first patients with COVID-19.
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was one of the first in the city to care for patients in early 2020 who were suffering from a then-unknown virus and is a key part of the disease’s epidemiological history.
“Just returned from a visit to Jinyintan Hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases and designated for the treatment of the first cases in Wuhan,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said in a Twitter post. “Stories quite similar to the ones I’ve heard from our ICU doctors.”
Zoologist Peter Daszak of the American group EcoHealth Alliance, a member of the team, said in a tweet that the visit was an “important opportunity to speak directly” with doctors who were fighting the virus at the critical time.
The first face-to-face meetings of the team with Chinese scientists took place on Friday, before experts in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, the Integrated Hospital for Chinese and Western Medicine. of Hubei.
The Geneva-based WHO said on Thursday afternoon on Twitter that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets such as the Huanan Seafood Market related to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and laboratories in facilities such as the Wuhan Center for Disease. Control.
“All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows science in its work to understand the origins of the COVID19 virus,” the WHO posted in a tweet. He said the team had already requested “detailed underlying data” and planned to speak with first responders and some of the first patients.
The mission has been politically charged as China tries to avoid blaming the alleged missteps in its first response to the outbreak.
A single visit by scientists is unlikely to confirm the origins of the virus. Detecting the animal deposit of an outbreak is usually a thorough effort that requires years of research, including animal sampling, genetic analysis, and epidemiological studies.
One possibility is that a wildlife thief passed the virus to traders who brought it to Wuhan. The Chinese government has promoted theories, with little evidence, that the outbreak could have started with imports of frozen seafood contaminated with the virus, a notion that was flatly rejected by scientists and international organizations.
A possible focus for researchers is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of China’s leading virus research labs, it built a genetic information archive on bat coronavirus after the 2003 SARS outbreak, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.