WHO Launches Full Investigation into COVID-19 Origins... China Says Evidence Will Be Hard to Find

Empty streets of Wuhan, China, the origin of COVID-19. Photo by Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Reporter Nahana] As the World Health Organization (WHO) has begun full-scale activities after visiting Wuhan, China to investigate the origin of COVID-19, Chinese experts claim that it will be difficult to find evidence.

The WHO expert team led by Peter Ben Embarek completed a 14-day quarantine in China and started full-scale activities, according to the Global Times. The team is expected to soon visit the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where the first cluster infection occurred, as well as local hospitals and research institutes to uncover evidence of the origin of COVID-19.

On the other hand, Chinese experts argue that it will be difficult to find evidence that COVID-19 originated from the Huanan Seafood Market.

Wu Zunyou, chief expert at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, explained, "On December 31, 2019, Wuhan reported 41 initial COVID-19 cases, of which only 27 were linked to the seafood market."

An infectious disease research team in Shanghai also discovered evidence that the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan may not be the origin of the COVID-19 virus, and published a related paper in the online edition of Nature in May last year, the Global Times reported.

Professor Yang Zhanqiu of Wuhan University’s Virus Research Institute stated, "Since the COVID-19 viruses that occurred in the US and EU have different genome sequences from those in China, it will be impossible to find the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan or the Huanan Seafood Market. Instead, some clues about transmission patterns may be discovered."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.