WUHAN, China – The virus that causes Covid-19 most likely jumped from one animal to another before entering the human population and is very unlikely to have leaked from a lab, said a leader of a World Health Organization research team. a press conference in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
In outlining the possibilities for the pandemic’s origins, the WHO team said on Tuesday that it was also possible that it could have been transmitted to humans through frozen food, a theory strongly promoted by Beijing. But the team said the most likely scenario was one where the virus naturally overflowed from an animal to a human, such as from a bat to a small mammal that then infected a person.
“Have we drastically changed the image we had beforehand? I don’t think so, ”said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety expert speaking on behalf of the WHO delegation. Have we improved our understanding? Did we add details to that photo? Absolutely.”
The preliminary assessment came during a press conference that followed a two-week mission to Wuhan, the pandemic’s original center, with 17 Chinese and 17 WHO experts. It comes more than a year after the virus first started spreading in China and around the world, killing more than two million people.
After looking at environmental samples from Wuhan’s Huanan Market, as well as thousands of biological samples and records from more than 200 local hospitals, Chinese and WHO researchers said the market was a place where the virus began to spread quickly, but they warned it was impossible. was to say how the virus got there in the first place.