WHO's mission to China ends without finding Covid origin

 
The World Health Organisation (WHO) team investigating the origins of the coronavirus has wrapped up its 28-day mission to Wuhan, China, without finding the origin of the virus.

Experts believe the disease, which has recorded over 109 million cases and killed 2.4 million people worldwide, most likely infected humans from an intermediate animal host. After the first clusters of Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan in late 2019, the government put the city of 11 million under a 76-day lockdown with strict restrictions on movement.

The WHO visit has not been short of controversies, with the probe plagued by delays, concerns over access and bickering between Beijing and Washington, reports The Straits Times. Here are some FAQs about the issue.

Who are the experts?

Led by Dr Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO scientist for food safety and zoonosis, the 14-member investigative team consists of epidemiologists, animal and human disease experts, veterinarians, medical doctors and virologists.

They include zoologist Peter Daszak, infectious disease expert Dominic Dwyer, Dr Marion Koopmans, a virologist from the Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and Danish epidemiologist Thea Kolsen Fischer.

What is the team's mission?

Apart from the laboratory leak hypothesis, the other three scenarios that the WHO-led team explored with their Chinese counterparts were that the virus had jumped directly from an animal host; that it infected humans via an intermediate animal species; and that its transmission to the human population was via frozen food products.

In the course of its investigation, the team visited key sites like the Huanan seafood market, where many of the first cases were discovered as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is involved in coronavirus research.

Did China undermine the WHO probe?

Western nations have criticised Beijing for not being fully transparent at the start of the outbreak, mishandling its initial stages and allowing the pathogen to escape beyond China's borders to ravage the world.

It did not help that the experts' visit to Wuhan was delayed by China, leading to a rare rebuke from director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in early January that he was "very disappointed" that Beijing has not given the green light.

There had also been worries about the team's access to data a year after the outbreak, amid concerns that the Chinese will try to stop embarrassing information from being released.

Although several WHO team members insisted that they were granted full access to the sites and people they requested to visit, some said they were not given raw data and instead relied on analyses by Chinese scientists.