The World Health Organization’s mission to trace the origins of Covid-19 got off to a rough start on Thursday, with two members of the 15-person delegation denied entry to China after failing to undergo medical examination procedures.
The two experts were prevented from boarding a plane to the city of Wuhan after testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies in blood-based serology tests during transit in Singapore, although they tested negative for Covid-19 in smear tests, Dow Jones reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the subject. Later, WHO confirmed that two scientists were trapped in the city-state while the video showed the others arriving in Wuhan around noon.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian avoided questions about the two scientists who were denied entry and how long the group members will be quarantined, but said their visas will be valid “long enough. to do their work in China “. The Global Times, supported by the Communist Party, previously reported that the quarantine period would last 14 days.
“The team of international experts will be quarantined in Wuhan, during which they will have video conferences with Chinese experts,” said Zhao at a regular meeting in Beijing on Thursday afternoon.
Peter Daszak, the only American on the mission, arrived in China after a negative test, according to a spokesman for the EcoHealth Alliance, the research organization he runs.
The experts will work with Chinese scientists to determine the origin of the pandemic, as they still store the strains for analysis and study, said Ihor Perehinets, technical consultant at the European WHO office, at a news conference. His comments were in response to a question about how the team would be able to identify the source after a year since the outbreak began.
In November, China established a requirement for negative results from a nucleic acid test and antibody test for all incoming travelers, as it strengthened safeguards to ensure that people arriving from abroad do not bring the coronavirus.
Although nucleic acid tests can detect the virus in a sample taken from a person’s respiratory tract, there is a chance that the result will give a false negative if the viral load where the swab was collected is below the minimum detection limit. An antibody test can indicate that a person is in the acute stage of infection when the test is positive for the IgM antibody, which is the first wave of antibodies generated to fight the infection.
Earlier this month, WHO expressed disappointment with China for delaying the trip of specialists to the country to investigate the origin of the virus, in a rare instance of public criticism by the international body.
– With the help of Melissa Cheok, John Liu, Jing Li and Lucille Liu
(Updates with the arrival of Daszak in the fifth paragraph)