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WHO’s Wuhan probe found signs of much wider Covid-19 outbreak in 2019: Report
The team also established that there were already over a dozen strains of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, circulating in December 2019.
The team of experts sent to China’s Wuhan to probe the origin of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) reportedly discovered several signs of a much wider outbreak in December 2019 than it was reported earlier. In an interview with CNN, World Health Organization (WHO) expert Peter Ben Embarek said that the investigators are seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the Chinese city that Beijing has not allowed them to examine.
According to Embarek, the team also established that there were already over a dozen strains of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, circulating in December. “The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding,” the head of the WHO-led team was quoted by the US media network as saying.
In December 2019, the UN health agency had picked up a media report about a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause emerging in China’s Wuhan. The virus outbreak was later identified as a novel coronavirus and China shared its genetic sequence with the WHO in early January. However, many scientists studying the origin of Covid-19 had indicated that the virus may have been spreading in China long before it was officially reported.
The Chinese scientists presented the visiting WHO team with 174 Covid-19 cases detected from in and around Wuhan in December 2019. The WHO food safety expert said the number suggests that the virus could have infected more than 1,000 people in Wuhan in that month, given around “15 per cent end up severe cases” that had been noticed by Chinese doctors but the “vast majority are mild cases.”
Read | 'Deep concerns' about WHO Covid-19 report from China: White House
During the interview, Embarek noted that broadening the type of genetic samples from early Covid-19 cases allowed them to examine partial genetic samples as well, instead of only the complete ones. He said that the scientists gathered 13 different genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from December 2019, which could provide significant clues about the origin and scale of the outbreak if they are able to examine it along with wider patient data from 2019.
“Some of them are from the markets...some of them are not linked to the markets," the expert was quoted as saying by CNN.
Over 108 million Covid-19 cases and nearly 2.4 million related deaths have been reported from across the globe, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center of Johns Hopkins University & Medicine. The United States remains the worst-hit country in terms of absolute numbers, with more than 27 million reported cases of coronavirus and over 484,000 related deaths.
