WUHAN, China (AP) – A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited two disease control centers on Monday that had an early hand in controlling the outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
WHO researchers arrived in Wuhan, the provincial capital, last month to search for clues and visited hospitals and a fish market where early cases were discovered.
The team visited both the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and the Wuhan City Office on Monday, amid tight Chinese controls over access to information about the virus.
China has sought to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak, while promoting alternative theories that the virus came from elsewhere and may even have been brought to Wuhan from outside the country.
After the visit to the provincial center, team member Peter Daszak told reporters that it was a “very good meeting, very important”. No other details were given.
The evidence the team gathers will add to what is expected to be a years-long search for answers. Finding out the animal sources of an outbreak requires enormous amounts of research, including animal sampling, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
In Geneva, WHO officials on Monday pushed back against suggestions that China is less than talking about how the pandemic started.
At a press conference, COVID-19 technical leader Maria Van Kerkhove said the team has plans to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among others.
“The more details you have on site, the more questions you have,” she said. “The team will monitor the information. They will follow the science and continue to ask questions and analyze data. Van Kerkhove said it is up to team members to decide what other field visits were needed, although China will need to approve the mission’s final agenda.
Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s head of emergencies, said WHO kept asking for more data, saying anyone with information about how the pandemic started should share it with the organization.
“We are in the field with experts from 10 countries looking for the answers. If you have the answers, if you think you have answers, let us know, ”he said. He fired critics who said a report of the mission would be incomplete, saying the team “deserves the support of the international community.”
China has largely curbed domestic transmission through rigorous testing and contact tracking. The wearing of masks in public is almost universally observed, and lockdowns are routinely imposed on communities and even entire cities where cases are detected. The latest outbreaks mainly occurred in the frigid Northeast, with 33 new cases reported nationwide in three provinces on Monday.
Despite this, China registered more than 2,000 new domestic cases of COVID-19 in January, the highest monthly total since the final phase of the initial outbreak in Wuhan last March. Two people died of the disease in January, the first reported COVID-19 deaths in China in a matter of months.
Schools have gone online and travel has been drastically reduced during this month’s Lunar New Year holiday, with the government encouraging people to stay during the main time for family gatherings in the vast country.