WUHAN, China: The virus that causes Covid-19 is likely to jump from one animal to another before entering the human population and is very unlikely to have leaked from a laboratory, a leader said of a World Health Organization research team at a press conference in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Exposing the possibilities of the origin of the pandemic, the WHO team said on Tuesday that it was also possible that it could be transmitted to humans through frozen food, a theory strongly promoted by Beijing. But the team said the most likely scenario was for the virus to spread naturally from an animal to humans, such as from a bat to a small mammal that then infected a person.
“Have we drastically changed the image we had previously? I don’t think so, “said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety expert who spoke on behalf of the WHO delegation.” Have we improved our understanding? Have we added details to this image? Absolutely. “
The preliminary assessment was made during a press conference that followed a two-week mission to Wuhan, the original center of the pandemic, which included 17 Chinese and 17 WHO experts. It comes more than a year after the virus first began spreading to China and around the world and killed more than two million people.
After reviewing environmental samples from Wuhan’s Huanan market, as well as thousands of biological samples and case files from more than 200 local hospitals, Chinese and WHO researchers said the market was a place where the virus began to spread. quickly, but warned that it was impossible to tell how the virus got there in the first place.