Members of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited another hospital in Wuhan that treated patients with early COVID-19 on Saturday.
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was one of the first cities to treat patients in early 2020 who were suffering from a virus unknown at the time and is an essential part of the epidemiological history of the disease.
“Right back from a visit to Jinyintan Hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases and was appointed to treat the first cases in Wuhan,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said in a Twitter post. “Stories quite similar to the ones we heard from our intensive care physicians.”
Zoologist Peter Daszak of the US group EcoHealth Alliance, who is a member of the team, said in a tweet that the visit is an “important opportunity to speak directly” with doctors who were fighting the virus at a critical time.
The first face-to-face meetings of the team with Chinese scientists took place on Friday, before experts in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, Hubei Hospital for Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine.
The Geneva-based WHO said late on Thursday on Twitter that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets such as the Huanan Seafood Market, which has been linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and laboratories in facilities, including Wuhan Disease Center. Control.
“All the hypotheses are on the table, as the team is pursuing science in their work to understand the origins of the COVID19 virus,” the WHO wrote on Twitter. He said the team had already requested “detailed underlying data” and planned to talk to first responders and some of the first patients.
The mission has become politically charged as China tries to avoid blame for the alleged mistakes in its early response to the outbreak.
A single visit by scientists is unlikely to confirm the origins of the virus. Fixing the animal reservoir of an outbreak is usually a thorough effort that requires years of research, including animal sampling, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
One possibility is that a wild poacher transmitted the virus to traders who transported it to Wuhan. The Chinese government has promoted theories with little evidence that the outbreak could have started with imports of frozen seafood contaminated with the virus, a notion flatly rejected by scientists and international agencies.
A possible focus for investigators is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of China’s leading antivirus research laboratories, it has built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of SARS or severe acute respiratory syndrome.