BEIJING: For almost a week, Chinese experts from the WHO joint team on COVID-19 origin-tracing studies have been revealing updates about the highly expected full report of the field studies about a month ago in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province – the first one reported confirmed coronavirus cases and welcomed the experts for the in-field work.
At the same time, the foreign experts of the team also delivered the message amid certain political pressure on the report, reflecting an intense and day-and-night communications between the two sides, insiders said.
A senior official of China’s CDC, and also the expert of the WHO joint team on COVID-19 tracing studies in China, laid out major recommendations for the next phase of global efforts in the search for the origins of the virus, including the need to conduct studies at a wider scope to look for possible animal hosts, including in neighboring countries, and not only restricting research to bat species. In a briefing with dozens of diplomats from 50 countries and two regional organizations on Friday at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Feng Zijian, Deputy Director-General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China’s CDC) who is also the expert of the WHO joint team, talked about major findings, the detailed work of the WHO-China joint team from January to February in Wuhan and made major recommendations for the next phase of the origin-tracing studies, which is global scientific cooperation. The source-tracing work of the WHO-China joint team in Wuhan, part of the global work of studying the virus origins, has been finalized with a consensus that this scientific work can’t be done overnight, Feng told the briefing. That the WHO-led origin-tracing work requires efforts on a global scale, of which China is just a part, is a consensus that came to between both the Chinese and the foreign experts of the joint team, Feng emphasized.
– The Daily Mail-Global Times News exchange item
