Coronavirus: WHO-led team visits animal health centre in China in search for virus origins

Stop at facility part of inquiry trying to piece together how the virus might have moved from bats to humans

After visiting disease control centre, seafood market and hospitals, team member says investigators’ trip is ‘excellent’

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Members of the WHO-led team investigating the origins of the coronavirus visit an animal health centre in Wuhan on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:21pm, 2 Feb 2021Updated: 11:49pm, 2 Feb 2021

A team of investigators led by the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived on Tuesday at an animal health facility in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in the search for clues about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The independent team has already visited key hospitals, the regional disease control centre and the city’s Huanan seafood market, where the first cluster of infections was believed to have originated late in 2019.

The trip was going “really well, excellent”, one of its members, Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, said on Tuesday, responding to a query just before entering the animal health centre.

The WHO-led team arrives at the Hubei Animal Epidemic Disease Prevention and Control Centre in Wuhan, Hubei province, on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters

As the team left, Daszak said the members had held “very informative meetings”, but did not elaborate.

The centre, in the province of Hubei, fights epidemic diseases in animals and could provide information on how a coronavirus endemic in horseshoe bats in southwest China might have crossed into humans, possibly via an intermediary species.