WUHAN, China – The virus that causes Covid-19 jumped from one animal to another before entering the human population and is very unlikely to have leaked from a laboratory, said a leader of an Organization investigation team World Health Organization at a press conference. the Chinese city of Wuhan.
In determining the possibilities for the pandemic, the WHO team said on Tuesday that it may also have been transmitted to humans through frozen food, a theory strongly promoted by Beijing. But the team said the most likely scenario was one in which the virus spread naturally from an animal to humans, such as from a bat to a small mammal that then infected a person.
“Did I dramatically change the image I had before? I don’t think so, “said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety expert who spoke on behalf of the WHO delegation. “Have we improved our understanding?” Did I add details to that image? Absolute.”
The preliminary assessment came during a press conference that followed a two-week mission to Wuhan, the original pandemic center, which included 17 Chinese experts and 17 WHO experts. It comes more than a year after the virus began 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 investigators said the market is a place where the virus has begun to spread. quickly, but warned that it is impossible to say how the virus got there in the first place.