WHO finds new clues over emergence of COVID-19 virus in China

Scientists probing the origins of the coronavirus are wrapping up a lengthy investigation in China and have found “important clues” about a Wuhan seafood market’s role in the outbreak. Investigators want to know how the SARS-CoV-2 virus – whose closest known relative came from bats 1,000 miles away – spread explosively in Wuhan before causing the worst contagion in more than a century.

Peter Daszak, a New York-based zoologist assisting the World Health Organization-sponsored mission, said, “It’s the beginning of hopefully a really deep understanding of what happened so we can stop the next one,” he said late last Friday. “That’s what this is all about – trying to understand why these things emerge so we don’t continually have global economic crashes and horrific mortality while we wait for vaccines. It’s just not a tenable future.”

The lack of a clear pathway from bats to humans has stoked speculation — refuted by Daszak and many other scientists — that the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a maximum bio-containment laboratory studying bat-borne coronaviruses.

About Chinese hosts, he reportedly said, “They’ve been working behind the scenes, digging up the information, looking at it, and getting it ready.” Daszak is one of 10 independent experts assisting the WHO mission along with five staff members and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health have two each.

Daszak said while the food market was almost cleaned immediately after the cases emerged. He added, that “People left in a hurry and they left equipment, they left utensils, they left evidence of what was going on, and that’s what we looked at.”.

Scientists in China who took environmental samples inside the market identified sites where traces of SARS-CoV-2 were detected, he said