WUHAN, China (AP) – A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited two disease control centers on Monday that participated in managing the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
WHO investigators arrived in Wuhan, the provincial capital, last month to look for clues and visited hospitals and a seafood market where the first cases were detected.
The team on Monday visited the Hubei Provincial Disease Control Center and its Wuhan prefecture amid tight Chinese controls on access to information about the virus.
China has sought to avoid blame for alleged errors in its initial response to the outbreak, while promoting alternative theories that the virus originated elsewhere and may even have been brought to Wuhan from outside the country.
After visiting the provincial center, team member Peter Daszak told reporters that it was a “very good, very important meeting”. No other details were given.
The evidence the team will gather will add to what is expected to be a years-long search for answers. Determining the animal sources of an outbreak requires a great deal of research, including animal samples, genetic analyzes and epidemiological studies.
In Geneva, WHO officials on Monday rejected suggestions that China is being less than informative about how the pandemic started.
At a news conference, WHO technical leader COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the team plans to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among other locations.
“The more details you have on the ground, the more questions you have,” she said. “The team will follow up on the information. They will follow science and continue to ask questions and analyze data ”. Van Kerkhove said it would be up to team members to decide what other field visits would be needed, although China must approve the mission’s final agenda.
Dr Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief of emergencies, said that WHO continues to request more data and that anyone with information about how the pandemic started should share it with the organization.
“We are in the field with experts from 10 countries looking to find the answers. If you have the answers, if you think you have some answers, please let us know, ”he said. He rejected critics who said any report on the mission would be incomplete and said the team “deserves the support of the international community”.
China has largely restricted domestic transmission through rigorous testing and contact tracking. The use of masks in public is observed almost universally and blockages are routinely imposed on communities and even entire cities where cases are detected. The latest outbreaks have occurred mainly in the icy northeast, with 33 new cases reported nationally on Monday in three provinces.
Despite this, China registered more than 2,000 new domestic cases of COVID-19 in January, the highest monthly total since the final phase of the initial outbreak in Wuhan last March. Two people died of the disease in January, the first reported deaths from COVID-19 in China in several months.
Schools went online and travel was drastically reduced during this month’s Lunar New Year holiday, with the government offering incentives for people to stay during the most important period for family reunions across the vast country.