WUHAN, China – The virus that causes Covid-19 to likely jump from one animal to another before entering the human population is highly unlikely to leak from a laboratory, an investigation team leader said of the World Health Organization at a news conference in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The WTO team said on Tuesday that it was also possible that it had been transmitted to humans through frozen food, a theory widely promoted by Beijing. But the team said the most likely scenario was one in which the virus of an animal naturally spread to humans, such as from a bat to a small mammal that infected a person.
“Have we dramatically changed the picture we had before? I do not think so, “said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety expert who spoke on behalf of the WTO delegation. “Have we improved our understanding? Did we add details to that photo? Absolutely. ”
The preliminary assessment took place during a news conference following a two-week mission to Wuhan, the original center of the pandemic, which included 17 Chinese and 17 WHO experts. This comes more than a year after the virus first started spreading in China and around the world, killing more than two million people.
After examining environmental samples from Wuhan’s Huanan market, as well as thousands of biological samples and case files from more than 200 local hospitals, Chinese and WHO researchers said the market was one place where the virus began to spread rapidly, but they warned that it it is impossible to say how the virus got there in the first place.