WUHAN, China (AP) – A World Health Organization team emerged from quarantine in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Thursday to begin fieldwork on a fact-finding mission into the origins of the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
The researchers, who had to go through 14 days in quarantine after arriving in China, left their quarantine hotel and boarded a bus in the middle of the afternoon.
The mission is politically charged, as China’s early response to the outbreak seeks to avoid blame for alleged wrongdoing. A big question is where the Chinese side will let the researchers go and who they can talk to.
Yellow barriers blocked the hotel entrance and kept media at bay. Before the researchers boarded, workers in full protective gear could see their luggage loaded onto the bus, including two musical instruments, a dumbbell and four yoga mattresses.
The hotel staff waved goodbye when the investigators boarded the bus, possibly en route to another hotel. The bus driver wore a white protective suit all over the body. The researchers wore face masks.
Earlier this month, former WHO official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the Wuhan team, warned against expecting breakthroughs and said it may be years before definitive conclusions can be drawn about the origin of the virus.
“This has now been over a year when it all started,” he said. So much of the physical evidence will be gone. People’s memories are inaccurate and likely the physical layout of many places will be different from what they were and how people move around, and so on. ”
Among the places they could visit are the Huanan Seafood Market, which was linked to many of the earliest cases, as well as research institutes and hospitals that treated patients at the height of the outbreak.
The mission came about after much arguing between the two sides that led to a rare complaint from the WHO that it was taking too long for China to make final arrangements.
China, strongly opposed to an independent investigation that it could not fully verify, said the matter was complicated and Chinese medical personnel were seized with new virus clusters Beijing, Shanghai and other cities.
Although the WHO was criticized early on, especially by the US, for not being critical enough of the Chinese response, it recently accused China and other countries of being too slow at the start of the outbreak, which on the Chinese side rare it could have been better.
Overall, however, China has vigorously defended its response, possibly out of concern about the reputation cost or even the financial cost of missing it.
“The WHO and global experts have given their full affirmation of the success of China’s epidemic prevention and tracing the origins of the past,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday. “Both sides have a fundamental consensus on collaboration in origin-related research, and related work is proceeding smoothly.”
Chinese officials and state media have tried to cast doubt on whether the virus even started in China. Most experts believe it came from bats, possibly in southwest China or adjacent areas of Southeast Asia, before it was passed on to another animal and then to humans.
The search for the origin will try to determine where and how exactly that happened.
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Associated Press photographer Ng Han Guan contributed to this report.