Finding source of coronavirus will help uncover how Covid-19 ‘invaded human species’, WHO official says

WHO’s director of infectious hazard management says tracking the virus’s origin will prevent the phenomenon from happening again

Many researchers believe the novel coronavirus came from bats, but passed through another species before being transmitted to humans

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A virologist in Belgium works on finding a treatment against Covid-19. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:18pm, 13 May 2020Updated: 5:23am, 14 May 2020

Pinning down the source of the coronavirus pandemic should help in working out how Covid-19 has “invaded the human species” so quickly, a senior WHO official said.

The outbreak has triggered a fierce diplomatic spat between China and the United States – with the World Health Organisation (WHO) at the centre of the row.

In late March, US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping struck an informal truce in the war of words over the origin of the deadly disease.

But it quickly broke down. Trump has been accusing Beijing of being slow to alert the world to the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and openly suspects China of covering up an accident at the eastern city’s virology lab.

Every time it jumps from one species to another, the virus can mutate a bit. That can have an impact on treatments.

Sylvie Briand

Far from the cross-Pacific spat, Sylvie Briand, the WHO’s director of infectious hazard management, said it was crucial to know the origin of the virus “to understand how it has evolved”.

“It is a virus of animal origin transmitted to humans. And so we have to try to understand how the adaptation of this virus allowed it to invade the human species,” she said outside the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.

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