Scientists hope WHO China visit will throw light on early Covid-19 probes

Questions remain for many international experts about initial Chinese investigations into origins of the new coronavirus

World Health Organisation investigators to lay the groundwork for mission to trace animal roots of deadly pandemic

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Officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan moved quickly to close the market linked to the earliest cases of Covid-19 infections. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 12:00pm, 12 Jul 2020Updated: 12:34pm, 12 Jul 2020

The World Health Organisation’s mission to China to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 disease is an opportunity to make public evidence already gathered in the country that has not been made widely available to researchers, international scientists say.

Two WHO staff are landing in China this weekend to meet officials from the National Health Commission as well as the Ministry of Science and Technology. The names of the WHO members – an epidemiologist and an animal health specialist – have not been made available. The organisation said they will lay the groundwork for an international team to investigate the animal origins of the virus at a later, undisclosed date.

“When we say a team is going for the preparations to China it doesn’t mean that China has not been researching on this, it doesn’t mean that we will be starting from scratch,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.

But some scientists say not enough of that research in China has been released. One information gap identified by Daniel Lucey, a specialist in infectious disease epidemics at Georgetown University in the US relates to the animals found at the market linked to the first identified cluster of cases in Wuhan, provincial capital of Hubei province in central China.

“They haven’t said what animals were sampled or what kind of tests they did, were [the animals] tested on the throat or the skin or the nose or the blood, none of that has even been made available, and why not?” said Lucey, who has been a part of response teams to major disease outbreaks around the world, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) – both, like Covid-19, caused by coronaviruses.

The virus first identified in Wuhan is believed to have come from an animal, likely a bat, but the route it took to infect humans remains unknown. Some theories have said the virus crossed into humans via an intermediary animal in the wildlife trade or at the wet market in Wuhan.

In May, China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention director Gao Fu said the animal samples taken from the Wuhan market were negative for the virus, making it unlikely that the virus had emerged there. However, questions have been raised about whether the samples were compromised after city officials moved to quickly sanitise the market area.