WUHAN, China (AP) – The coronavirus most likely first appeared in humans after jumping from an animal, a team of international and Chinese scientists searching for the origin of COVID-19 said Tuesday, and an alternative theory said that the virus leaked from a Chinese. lab was unlikely.
A closely-followed visit by World Health Organization experts to Wuhan – the Chinese city where the first cases of coronavirus were discovered – did not drastically change current knowledge of the early days of the pandemic, said Peter Ben Embarek, WHO mission leader. .
But it “added details to that story,” he said at a news conference as the group completed a four-week visit to the city.
And it enabled the joint Chinese-WHO team to further investigate the laboratory leak theory – which former US President Donald Trump and his administration officials had presented without evidence – and conclude that it was unlikely. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is home to many different virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have been the source of the original outbreak, either on purpose or accidentally.
Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and animal diseases, said experts now consider the possibility of such a leak so unlikely that it will not be presented as an avenue for future research. But another team member, Danish scientist Thea Koelsen Fischer, told reporters that team members couldn’t rule out the possibility of further research and new leads.
China had already strongly rejected the possibility of a leak and has promoted other theories. The Chinese and foreign experts have considered different ideas about how the disease first reached humans, leading to a pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
Embarek said the initial findings suggest the most likely route the virus took was from one bat to another animal and then to humans, adding that further research would be needed.
“The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is very unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population,” he said.
When asked why, Embarek said accidental releases are extremely rare and the team’s assessment of the Wuhan Institute’s laboratory operations indicated it would be difficult to escape anything from them.
He also noted that this virus had not been reported in any laboratory before the pandemic. Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese side, also emphasized that, saying there was no example of this in the Wuhan Institute.
The mission was intended as a first step in the process of understanding the origin of the virus, which scientists have posited, may have passed to humans through a wild animal, such as a pangolin or bamboo rat. Transmission directly from bats to humans or through the frozen food trade is also possible, Embarek said.
The WHO team’s visit is politically sensitive to Beijing, which is concerned about the blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. An AP investigation has been found that the Chinese government curtailed investigations into the outbreak and ordered scientists not to talk to reporters.
Still, a member of the WHO team, British-born zoologist Peter Daszak, told The Associated Press last week that they enjoyed a greater degree of openness than they expected, and that they were given full access to all the sites and staff they requested.
Koelsen Fischer said she did not get to see the raw data and had to rely on an analysis of the data presented to her. But she said that would be true in most countries.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the US is looking forward to the report and underlying data from the WHO investigation.
The team – which includes experts from 10 countries who arrived on January 14 – visited the Huanan Seafood Market, the site of an early cluster of cases in late 2019.
Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist on the team, said some animals on the market were or were suspected of being susceptible to the virus, including rabbits and bamboo rats. And some can be traced to farms or traders in regions where the bats that carry the most closely related virus to the virus that causes COVID-19 live.
She said the next step would be to take a closer look at farms.
Liang, the head of the Chinese team, said the virus also appears to have spread in parts of the city other than the market, so it remains possible that the virus may have originated elsewhere.
The team found no evidence that the disease was spreading more widely than the first outbreak in the second half of December 2019.
“We have not been able to complete the study, but there is no indication that there were clusters before what we saw happen in Wuhan in the latter part of December,” Liang said.
The WHO team’s visit took months to negotiate. China agreed only under international pressure at the WHO World Health Assembly meeting last May, and Beijing continued to oppose calls for a strict independent investigation.
While China has endured some local flare-ups of infection since the outbreak was contained last year, life in Wuhan itself has largely returned to normal.
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Associated Press writers Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark contributed to this report.