-Australian representative on WHO’s China Mission confirms no cases found earlier than December 8, 2019
-Debunks politically motivated claims of engineering the Virus in Wuhan Lab
-The virus was most likely of animal origin but not emerged in Wuhan
SYDNEY: Australian representative (Dominic Dwyer) on World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as COVID-19 rebuffed rhetoric about COVID-19 origin, that western media said was emerged from China’s Wuhan city. In an article Mr. Dominic Dwyer noted “much has been said of the politics surrounding the mission. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people” adding that as part of the mission, “we met the man who, on December 8, 2019, was the first confirmed COVID case; he’s since recovered. We met the husband of a doctor who died of COVID.
We met the doctors who worked in the Wuhan hospitals treating those early COVID cases, and learned what happened to them and their colleagues”. Animal origins, but not necessarily at the Wuhan markets: The Australian representative said “our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location”.
He said such “zoonotic” diseases have triggered pandemics before, they (WHO experts) were still working to confirm the exact chain of events that led to the current pandemic. Sampling of bats in Hubei province and
[11:25 pm, 23/02/2021] Dm Qadeer: wildlife across China has revealed no SARS-CoV-2 to date.
Regarding the claims of COVID origin from animal transformation to human Mr. Dominic said “there were no evidence available to verify such claims that animal products caused the outbreak specifically in Wuhan city.
The article said a summary of modeling studies of the time to the most recent common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 sequences estimated the start of the pandemic between mid-November and early December. There are also publications suggesting SARS-CoV-2 circulation in various countries earlier than the first case in Wuhan, although these require confirmation.
It further added that the market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. So we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins.
Frozen or refrigerated food not ruled out in the spread: In reference to the “cold chain” hypothesis, the article wrote “this is the idea the virus might have originated from elsewhere via the farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration or freezing of food” but what is the authentic source of causing outbreak the author said “we don’t know”.
Extremely unlikely the virus escaped from a lab: The mission also rejected the politically backed rhetoric that the virus was engineered in lab as the Mr. Dominic said in the same article “the most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely” adding that “while viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare.
So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan”. He said that the mission looked at the clinical epidemiology (how COVID-19 spread among people), the molecular epidemiology (the genetic makeup of the virus and its spread), and the role of animals and the environment.
He went on to say the clinical epidemiology group alone looked at China’s records of 76,000 episodes from more than 200 institutions of anything that could have resembled COVID-19 such as influenza-like illnesses, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. They found no clear evidence of substantial circulation of COVID-19 in Wuhan during the latter part of 2019 before the first case.
The article concluded that this was experience of the mission in its first phase of investigation that was carried in China’s Wuhan city. It said investigators will also look further afield for data, to investigate evidence the virus was circulating in Europe, for instance, earlier in 2019. Investigators will continue to test wildlife and other animals in the region for signs of the virus. And the mission will continue to learn from its experience in China to improve how to investigate the pandemic in next phases.
–Courtesy The Conversation
