Members of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited another hospital in Wuhan that had treated early COVID-19 patients on their second full day of work on Saturday.
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was one of the first in the city to treat patients suffering from a then unknown virus in early 2020 and is an important part of the epidemiological history of the disease.
“Just returned from a visit to the Jinyintan hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases and was intended to treat the first cases in Wuhan,” said Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans in a message on Twitter. “Stories similar to what I’ve heard from our ICU doctors.”
Zoologist Peter Daszak of the US group EcoHealth Alliance, who is a member of the team, said in a tweet that the visit was an “important opportunity to speak directly” with medics fighting the virus at the critical moment.
The team’s first face-to-face meetings with Chinese scientists took place Friday, before the experts specializing in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.
The Geneva-based WHO said on Twitter late Thursday that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets such as the Huanan Seafood Market, which was linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and laboratories in facilities such as the Wuhan Center for Disease. Check.
“All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows science in their work to understand the origin of the COVID19 virus,” the WHO tweeted. It said the team had already asked for “detailed underlying data” and planned to speak with early responders and some of the first patients.
The mission is politically charged, as China’s early response to the outbreak seeks to avoid blame for alleged wrongdoing.
A single visit from scientists is unlikely to confirm the origin of the virus. Securing the animal reservoir from an outbreak is usually an exhausting endeavor that requires years of research, including animal sampling, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
One possibility is that a wild animal poacher passed on the virus to traders who brought it to Wuhan. The Chinese government has promoted theories, with little evidence, that the outbreak could have started with imports of frozen seafood contaminated with the virus, an idea that has been flatly rejected by international scientists and agencies.
A possible focus for researchers is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was one of the top virus research labs in China, building an archive of genetic information on bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of SARS, aka severe acute respiratory syndrome.