WHO virus probe seeks answers beyond Wuhan, discounts lab theory
Although they did not reach definite conclusions, they have all but ruled out the possibility that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
FOREIGNER.FI/DPA
FEBRUARY 10, 2021
More research is needed to find out whether the novel coronavirus originated in bats in China or in another country, an expert group led by the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday at the end of a month-long investigation in China.
The most likely hypothesis that has emerged is that the virus came from an animal species, moved to a second intermediary species and jumped to humans, WHO animal disease expert Peter Ben Embarek told a press conference in Wuhan, where the Covid-19 disease was first detected in December 2019.
Scientists from China, 10 other countries and UN organizations spent the past weeks examining markets, health facilities and laboratories in and around the city of Wuhan to find the source of the pandemic.
Although they did not reach definite conclusions, they have all but ruled out the possibility that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Embarek said that the "laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the population," given no laboratory in the area had been working with such a virus.
The novel coronavirus, scientifically known as Sars-CoV-2, is most closely related to viruses found in bats and in pangolins.
"However, the viruses identified so far from neither of these species are sufficiently similar to Sars-CoV-2" to determine the winged creatures as the source and the scaled mammals as intermediary hosts, said Chinese investigation team leader Liang Wannian.
Other countries in Asia
Embarek stressed that further investigations should not only focus on China but on other countries in Asia and beyond.
More work is needed to sample bats and other possible host species abroad, he said.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the "jury is still out" on whether China has provided enough transparency regarding the novel coronavirus.
"Broadly speaking we have expressed our concerns regarding the need for full transparency and access from China and the WHO to all information regarding the earliest days of the pandemic," Price added.
The US under former president Donald Trump pushed the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, while the administration of President Joe Biden has called for more evidence before concluding an origin of the virus.
Embarek also pointed out that the virus may have been introduced to Wuhan by travellers or through frozen wild animal products from other Chinese regions or countries.
Liang highlighted some studies suggesting that the virus was already present abroad in late 2019, in line with theories of a foreign virus origin that have been propagated by Beijing.
The foreign investigation team members did not confirm such theories, but they said that more data from early cases outside China are needed to map the path that the virus took.
While it is clear that the virus can survive on frozen products, there is no proof yet that anyone has been infected in this way, Embarek pointed out.
Huanan market
The WHO-led mission in China focused on Wuhan's Huanan market where the first cluster of Covid-19 infections appeared in late 2019.
The market sells seafood and farmed wild animals, raising the question whether some of the animals carried the virus.
None of the animal samples from the market have tested positive, Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans told the press conference.
However, some of the species, including rabbits, are known to be susceptible to the virus. There are suspicions that ferret-badgers and bamboo rats that were on offer at Huanan market are also able to catch the virus, according to Koopmans.
Some of these animals have been traced back to regions with bat populations, she said, stressing that further investigations on this issue are needed.
The market was not the only place in Wuhan where people started falling ill with Covid-19 in December 2019, according to the WHO team members. However, they did not find evidence of earlier cases in hospital and pharmacy records.
Although they did not reach definite conclusions, they have all but ruled out the possibility that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Medical team work at Temple Street in Hong Kong.
Photo: Liau Chung-Ren/dpa.
FOREIGNER.FI/DPA
FEBRUARY 10, 2021
More research is needed to find out whether the novel coronavirus originated in bats in China or in another country, an expert group led by the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday at the end of a month-long investigation in China.
The most likely hypothesis that has emerged is that the virus came from an animal species, moved to a second intermediary species and jumped to humans, WHO animal disease expert Peter Ben Embarek told a press conference in Wuhan, where the Covid-19 disease was first detected in December 2019.
Scientists from China, 10 other countries and UN organizations spent the past weeks examining markets, health facilities and laboratories in and around the city of Wuhan to find the source of the pandemic.
Although they did not reach definite conclusions, they have all but ruled out the possibility that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Embarek said that the "laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the population," given no laboratory in the area had been working with such a virus.
The novel coronavirus, scientifically known as Sars-CoV-2, is most closely related to viruses found in bats and in pangolins.
"However, the viruses identified so far from neither of these species are sufficiently similar to Sars-CoV-2" to determine the winged creatures as the source and the scaled mammals as intermediary hosts, said Chinese investigation team leader Liang Wannian.
Other countries in Asia
Embarek stressed that further investigations should not only focus on China but on other countries in Asia and beyond.
More work is needed to sample bats and other possible host species abroad, he said.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the "jury is still out" on whether China has provided enough transparency regarding the novel coronavirus.
"Broadly speaking we have expressed our concerns regarding the need for full transparency and access from China and the WHO to all information regarding the earliest days of the pandemic," Price added.
The US under former president Donald Trump pushed the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, while the administration of President Joe Biden has called for more evidence before concluding an origin of the virus.
Embarek also pointed out that the virus may have been introduced to Wuhan by travellers or through frozen wild animal products from other Chinese regions or countries.
Liang highlighted some studies suggesting that the virus was already present abroad in late 2019, in line with theories of a foreign virus origin that have been propagated by Beijing.
The foreign investigation team members did not confirm such theories, but they said that more data from early cases outside China are needed to map the path that the virus took.
While it is clear that the virus can survive on frozen products, there is no proof yet that anyone has been infected in this way, Embarek pointed out.
Huanan market
The WHO-led mission in China focused on Wuhan's Huanan market where the first cluster of Covid-19 infections appeared in late 2019.
The market sells seafood and farmed wild animals, raising the question whether some of the animals carried the virus.
None of the animal samples from the market have tested positive, Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans told the press conference.
However, some of the species, including rabbits, are known to be susceptible to the virus. There are suspicions that ferret-badgers and bamboo rats that were on offer at Huanan market are also able to catch the virus, according to Koopmans.
Some of these animals have been traced back to regions with bat populations, she said, stressing that further investigations on this issue are needed.
The market was not the only place in Wuhan where people started falling ill with Covid-19 in December 2019, according to the WHO team members. However, they did not find evidence of earlier cases in hospital and pharmacy records.
WUHAN, China — The coronavirus most likely first appeared in humans after jumping from an animal, a team of international and Chinese scientists looking for the origins of COVID-19 said Tuesday, saying an alternate theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab was unlikely.
© Provided by The Canadian Press
A closely watched visit by World Health Organization experts to Wuhan — the Chinese city where the first coronavirus cases were discovered — did not dramatically change the current understanding of the early days of the pandemic, said Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the WHO mission.
But it did “add details to that story,” he said at a news conference as the group wrapped up a four-week visit to the city.
And it allowed the joint Chinese-WHO team to further explore the lab leak theory — which former U.S. President Donald Trump and officials from his administration had put forward without evidence — and decide it was unlikely. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is home to many different virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have been the source of the original outbreak, whether on purpose or accidentally.
Embarek, a WHO food safety and animal disease expert, said experts now consider the possibility of such a leak so improbable that it will not be suggested as an avenue of future study. But another team member, Danish scientist Thea Koelsen Fischer, told reporters that team members could not rule out the possibility of further investigation and new leads.
China had already strongly rejected the possibility of a leak and has promoted other theories. The Chinese and foreign experts considered several ideas for how the disease first ended up in humans, leading to a pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
Embarek said the initial findings suggest the most likely pathway the virus followed was from a bat to another animal and then to humans, adding that would require further research.
“The findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population," he said.
Asked why, Embarek said accidental releases are extremely rare and that the team's review of the Wuhan institute's lab operations indicated it would be hard for anything to escape from it.
He also noted that there were no reports of this virus in any lab anywhere before the pandemic. Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese side, also emphasized that, saying there was no sample of it in the Wuhan institute.
The mission was intended to be an initial step in the process of understanding the origins of the virus, which scientists have posited may have passed to humans through a wild animal, such as a pangolin or bamboo rat. Transmission directly from bats to humans or through the trade in frozen food products are also possibilities, Embarek said.
The WHO team's visit is politically sensitive for Beijing, which is concerned about being blamed for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. An AP investigation has found that the Chinese government put limits on research into the outbreak and ordered scientists not to speak to reporters.
Still, one member of the WHO team, British-born zoologist Peter Daszak, told The Associated Press last week that they enjoyed a greater level of openness than they had anticipated, and that they were granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested.
Koelsen Fischer said she did not get to see the raw data and had to rely on an analysis of the data that was presented to her. But she said that would be true in most countries.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. looked forward to seeing the report and the underlying data from the WHO investigation.
The team — which includes experts from 10 countries who arrived on Jan. 14 — visited the Huanan Seafood Market, the site of an early cluster of cases in late 2019.
Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist on the team, said that some animals at the market were susceptible or suspected to be susceptible to the virus, including rabbits and bamboo rats. And some could be traced to farms or traders in regions that are home to the bats that carry the closest related virus to the one that causes COVID-19.
She said the next step would be to look more closely at farms.
Liang, the head of the Chinese team, said the virus also appeared to have been spreading in parts of the city other than the market, so it remains possible that the virus originated elsewhere.
The team found no evidence that the disease was spreading widely any earlier than the initial outbreak in the second half of December 2019.
“We haven’t been able to fully do the research, but there is no indication there were clusters before what we saw happen in the later part of December in Wuhan,” Liang said.
The visit by the WHO team took months to negotiate. China only agreed to it amid international pressure at the WHO's World Health Assembly meeting last May, and Beijing has continued to resist calls for a strictly independent investigation.
While China has weathered some localized resurgences of infection since getting the outbreak under control last year, life in Wuhan itself has largely returned to normal.
___
Associated Press writers Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.
Emily Wang Fujiyama, The Associated Press
A closely watched visit by World Health Organization experts to Wuhan — the Chinese city where the first coronavirus cases were discovered — did not dramatically change the current understanding of the early days of the pandemic, said Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the WHO mission.
But it did “add details to that story,” he said at a news conference as the group wrapped up a four-week visit to the city.
And it allowed the joint Chinese-WHO team to further explore the lab leak theory — which former U.S. President Donald Trump and officials from his administration had put forward without evidence — and decide it was unlikely. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is home to many different virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have been the source of the original outbreak, whether on purpose or accidentally.
Embarek, a WHO food safety and animal disease expert, said experts now consider the possibility of such a leak so improbable that it will not be suggested as an avenue of future study. But another team member, Danish scientist Thea Koelsen Fischer, told reporters that team members could not rule out the possibility of further investigation and new leads.
China had already strongly rejected the possibility of a leak and has promoted other theories. The Chinese and foreign experts considered several ideas for how the disease first ended up in humans, leading to a pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
Embarek said the initial findings suggest the most likely pathway the virus followed was from a bat to another animal and then to humans, adding that would require further research.
“The findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population," he said.
Asked why, Embarek said accidental releases are extremely rare and that the team's review of the Wuhan institute's lab operations indicated it would be hard for anything to escape from it.
He also noted that there were no reports of this virus in any lab anywhere before the pandemic. Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese side, also emphasized that, saying there was no sample of it in the Wuhan institute.
The mission was intended to be an initial step in the process of understanding the origins of the virus, which scientists have posited may have passed to humans through a wild animal, such as a pangolin or bamboo rat. Transmission directly from bats to humans or through the trade in frozen food products are also possibilities, Embarek said.
The WHO team's visit is politically sensitive for Beijing, which is concerned about being blamed for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. An AP investigation has found that the Chinese government put limits on research into the outbreak and ordered scientists not to speak to reporters.
Still, one member of the WHO team, British-born zoologist Peter Daszak, told The Associated Press last week that they enjoyed a greater level of openness than they had anticipated, and that they were granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested.
Koelsen Fischer said she did not get to see the raw data and had to rely on an analysis of the data that was presented to her. But she said that would be true in most countries.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. looked forward to seeing the report and the underlying data from the WHO investigation.
The team — which includes experts from 10 countries who arrived on Jan. 14 — visited the Huanan Seafood Market, the site of an early cluster of cases in late 2019.
Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist on the team, said that some animals at the market were susceptible or suspected to be susceptible to the virus, including rabbits and bamboo rats. And some could be traced to farms or traders in regions that are home to the bats that carry the closest related virus to the one that causes COVID-19.
She said the next step would be to look more closely at farms.
Liang, the head of the Chinese team, said the virus also appeared to have been spreading in parts of the city other than the market, so it remains possible that the virus originated elsewhere.
The team found no evidence that the disease was spreading widely any earlier than the initial outbreak in the second half of December 2019.
“We haven’t been able to fully do the research, but there is no indication there were clusters before what we saw happen in the later part of December in Wuhan,” Liang said.
The visit by the WHO team took months to negotiate. China only agreed to it amid international pressure at the WHO's World Health Assembly meeting last May, and Beijing has continued to resist calls for a strictly independent investigation.
While China has weathered some localized resurgences of infection since getting the outbreak under control last year, life in Wuhan itself has largely returned to normal.
___
Associated Press writers Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.
Emily Wang Fujiyama, The Associated Press
China seizes on lack of WHO breakthrough in Wuhan to claim coronavirus vindication
Reading Chinese state media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of Covid-19 had ruled out Wuhan as the potential source of the pandemic
.
© Peter Ben Embarek (L) and Marion Koopmans (R) attend a press conference to wrap up a visit by an international team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the city of Wuhan, in China's Hubei province on February 9, 2021.
(Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
Ahead of their four-week visit to the central Chinese city, which wrapped up this week, the WHO team had warned their research might not turn up anything particularly groundbreaking. They cited the length of time since infections first started spreading in Wuhan, and the degree to which the city has been disinfected and sterilized since, as residents endured a lengthy lockdown and subsequently returned to relative normality.
And so therefore -- while somewhat disappointing -- it was no shock that the team did not reveal any major surprises in presenting their findings Tuesday. The most definitive the investigators could be was in dismissing suggestions that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab dedicated to studying such infections. On most other issues, the WHO experts prevaricated or admitted there was no clear evidence.
"Did we change dramatically the picture we had beforehand? I don't think so," said Peter Ben Embarek, one of the WHO investigators, at a news conference. "Did we add details? Absolutely."
State media's take
Chinese state media used comments from the fiercely apolitical scientists to vindicate various propaganda priorities, chief of which is the suggestion that the virus could have come from outside China.
China Daily, a state-run newspaper targeting international readers, ran the headline "WHO team: Probe of virus' origin should not be 'geographically bound'," while Global Times, a nationalist tabloid, took it a step further, saying WHO was ready to "scrutinize Southeast Asia" as a potential origin of the virus.
Chinese experts who worked alongside the team went further than their WHO colleagues in describing their conclusions, at least when those findings could be spun to clear Wuhan as a potential origin of the pandemic.
Liang Wannian, a lead expert with China's National Health Commission (NHC), told reporters it was still unclear how the virus arrived at the Huanan Seafood Market, previously identified as the site of the earliest outbreak. He said it could have been brought in by infected people, contaminated products, frozen foods, or animals.
Animals have long been seen as the most likely spreader of the virus before it jumped to humans. Previously it has been hypothesized that the virus evolved inside bats, which are prone to coronaviruses, and then passed to humans, potentially via a third species.
"Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one way that will require more studies and more specific targeted research," Ben Embarek said, adding there was also the possibility of "direct zoonotic spillover," or point to point transmission from the original species -- most likely a bat -- to humans.
In the WHO news conference, Ben Embarek also addressed two other theories: that the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, which he said was unlikely, or that it had been transmitted to humans via frozen foods, which he said had not been ruled out.
China's alternative origin theories
For months, Chinese experts have been pushing the theory that the frozen food supply chain could have brought the virus to Wuhan from another country, a possibility considered unlikely by most outside scientists.
Late last year, the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed that "all available evidence suggests that (the coronavirus) did not start in central China's Wuhan, but may come into China through imported frozen food products and their packaging."
Both WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have previously said there is no evidence of the virus being transmitted via food or food packaging, even after it reached pandemic level and was far more prevalent in warehouses and factories.
WHO team members are painfully aware of how much scrutiny they are under, both from a world desperate to understand how the pandemic started, and the Chinese, who are seeking full vindication for their early missteps in handling the pandemic.
It was those initial errors -- undeniable, and largely unrelated to the ultimate origin of the virus -- which the WHO team's findings have inadvertently helped obfuscate.
For months now, China's propaganda apparatus has been attempting to reverse the public relations disaster of being the country where the pandemic first emerged, and Tuesday's news conference offered considerable ammunition.
Speaking to Chinese media after the WHO news conference, Zeng Guang, head of the country's Centers for Disease Control, also dredged up another (baseless) conspiracy theory -- that the virus started in an American lab.
"American biology laboratories are all over the world. Why should America set up so many laboratories? What is the purpose? he said. "In many things, the United States requires others to be open and transparent, only to find that the most opaque thing is the United States itself."
Zeng said the WHO should "trace the source of the virus on a global scale," and the US should be the focus of the investigation.
Suggestions that the novel coronavirus could have evolved outside of China or been introduced to Wuhan via frozen foods are being used by Chinese state media to imply that the country was helpless to stop the virus before it became unstoppable.
Early mishandling of outbreak
While Chinese officials can't be blamed for not identifying a handful of cases of pneumonia as the start of the next great pandemic, that is not what has been faulted when it comes to the Wuhan outbreak. What was egregious about that response wasn't that the government ignored evidence of a potential pandemic when it was staring officials in the face.
According to documents leaked to CNN by whistleblowers, as well as other reports and publicly available information, Wuhan and national officials downplayed the risk of the virus even when there was clear evidence of transmission from person to person. Action was not taken until it was too late to stop widespread transmission of the virus during the 2020 Lunar New Year travel period, even though officials had been warned it was "likely to develop into a major public health event." In Wuhan, the government even held a mass banquet in an attempt to break a world record.
The first cases in Wuhan occurred between December 12 and December 29, 2019 according to city authorities. The cases weren't reported to WHO until December 31. By the time Wuhan went into lockdown on January 23, 2020, the virus had already spread to Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the US.
"It was clear they did make mistakes -- and not just mistakes that happen when you're dealing with a novel virus -- also bureaucratic and politically-motivated errors in how they handled it," Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN last year.
Last month, the Switzerland-based Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said Beijing could have been more vigorous in applying public health measures when cases were first detected in Wuhan.
"What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January (2020)," the panel said in a report.
Ultimately, these are political and historical questions, not scientific ones. The virus may be found to have evolved outside of China, maybe even spread to Wuhan via frozen foods, as the country's health officials have claimed. But this would not alter the fact that Wuhan was the site of the initial major outbreak, or that officials there failed to stop it from spreading.
When it comes to the coronavirus however, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the leaders of other countries that were slow to respond must share some of it.
If Chinese officials should have acted faster when faced by the evidence they had in January 2020, what of authorities elsewhere in the world -- including the US -- who ignored the even greater evidence of an incoming pandemic weeks and months later?
As for how the virus itself evolved and first jumped to humans, that quest continues. Speaking to CNN Tuesday, WHO team member Peter Daszak said that eventually scientists will "get a really clear picture" of how the virus originated but that may take weeks, months or even a "couple of years."
"There is still a lot of work to do," he said.
Ahead of their four-week visit to the central Chinese city, which wrapped up this week, the WHO team had warned their research might not turn up anything particularly groundbreaking. They cited the length of time since infections first started spreading in Wuhan, and the degree to which the city has been disinfected and sterilized since, as residents endured a lengthy lockdown and subsequently returned to relative normality.
And so therefore -- while somewhat disappointing -- it was no shock that the team did not reveal any major surprises in presenting their findings Tuesday. The most definitive the investigators could be was in dismissing suggestions that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab dedicated to studying such infections. On most other issues, the WHO experts prevaricated or admitted there was no clear evidence.
"Did we change dramatically the picture we had beforehand? I don't think so," said Peter Ben Embarek, one of the WHO investigators, at a news conference. "Did we add details? Absolutely."
State media's take
Chinese state media used comments from the fiercely apolitical scientists to vindicate various propaganda priorities, chief of which is the suggestion that the virus could have come from outside China.
China Daily, a state-run newspaper targeting international readers, ran the headline "WHO team: Probe of virus' origin should not be 'geographically bound'," while Global Times, a nationalist tabloid, took it a step further, saying WHO was ready to "scrutinize Southeast Asia" as a potential origin of the virus.
Chinese experts who worked alongside the team went further than their WHO colleagues in describing their conclusions, at least when those findings could be spun to clear Wuhan as a potential origin of the pandemic.
Liang Wannian, a lead expert with China's National Health Commission (NHC), told reporters it was still unclear how the virus arrived at the Huanan Seafood Market, previously identified as the site of the earliest outbreak. He said it could have been brought in by infected people, contaminated products, frozen foods, or animals.
Animals have long been seen as the most likely spreader of the virus before it jumped to humans. Previously it has been hypothesized that the virus evolved inside bats, which are prone to coronaviruses, and then passed to humans, potentially via a third species.
"Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one way that will require more studies and more specific targeted research," Ben Embarek said, adding there was also the possibility of "direct zoonotic spillover," or point to point transmission from the original species -- most likely a bat -- to humans.
In the WHO news conference, Ben Embarek also addressed two other theories: that the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, which he said was unlikely, or that it had been transmitted to humans via frozen foods, which he said had not been ruled out.
China's alternative origin theories
For months, Chinese experts have been pushing the theory that the frozen food supply chain could have brought the virus to Wuhan from another country, a possibility considered unlikely by most outside scientists.
Late last year, the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed that "all available evidence suggests that (the coronavirus) did not start in central China's Wuhan, but may come into China through imported frozen food products and their packaging."
Both WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have previously said there is no evidence of the virus being transmitted via food or food packaging, even after it reached pandemic level and was far more prevalent in warehouses and factories.
WHO team members are painfully aware of how much scrutiny they are under, both from a world desperate to understand how the pandemic started, and the Chinese, who are seeking full vindication for their early missteps in handling the pandemic.
It was those initial errors -- undeniable, and largely unrelated to the ultimate origin of the virus -- which the WHO team's findings have inadvertently helped obfuscate.
For months now, China's propaganda apparatus has been attempting to reverse the public relations disaster of being the country where the pandemic first emerged, and Tuesday's news conference offered considerable ammunition.
Speaking to Chinese media after the WHO news conference, Zeng Guang, head of the country's Centers for Disease Control, also dredged up another (baseless) conspiracy theory -- that the virus started in an American lab.
"American biology laboratories are all over the world. Why should America set up so many laboratories? What is the purpose? he said. "In many things, the United States requires others to be open and transparent, only to find that the most opaque thing is the United States itself."
Zeng said the WHO should "trace the source of the virus on a global scale," and the US should be the focus of the investigation.
Suggestions that the novel coronavirus could have evolved outside of China or been introduced to Wuhan via frozen foods are being used by Chinese state media to imply that the country was helpless to stop the virus before it became unstoppable.
Early mishandling of outbreak
While Chinese officials can't be blamed for not identifying a handful of cases of pneumonia as the start of the next great pandemic, that is not what has been faulted when it comes to the Wuhan outbreak. What was egregious about that response wasn't that the government ignored evidence of a potential pandemic when it was staring officials in the face.
According to documents leaked to CNN by whistleblowers, as well as other reports and publicly available information, Wuhan and national officials downplayed the risk of the virus even when there was clear evidence of transmission from person to person. Action was not taken until it was too late to stop widespread transmission of the virus during the 2020 Lunar New Year travel period, even though officials had been warned it was "likely to develop into a major public health event." In Wuhan, the government even held a mass banquet in an attempt to break a world record.
The first cases in Wuhan occurred between December 12 and December 29, 2019 according to city authorities. The cases weren't reported to WHO until December 31. By the time Wuhan went into lockdown on January 23, 2020, the virus had already spread to Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the US.
"It was clear they did make mistakes -- and not just mistakes that happen when you're dealing with a novel virus -- also bureaucratic and politically-motivated errors in how they handled it," Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN last year.
Last month, the Switzerland-based Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said Beijing could have been more vigorous in applying public health measures when cases were first detected in Wuhan.
"What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January (2020)," the panel said in a report.
Ultimately, these are political and historical questions, not scientific ones. The virus may be found to have evolved outside of China, maybe even spread to Wuhan via frozen foods, as the country's health officials have claimed. But this would not alter the fact that Wuhan was the site of the initial major outbreak, or that officials there failed to stop it from spreading.
When it comes to the coronavirus however, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the leaders of other countries that were slow to respond must share some of it.
If Chinese officials should have acted faster when faced by the evidence they had in January 2020, what of authorities elsewhere in the world -- including the US -- who ignored the even greater evidence of an incoming pandemic weeks and months later?
As for how the virus itself evolved and first jumped to humans, that quest continues. Speaking to CNN Tuesday, WHO team member Peter Daszak said that eventually scientists will "get a really clear picture" of how the virus originated but that may take weeks, months or even a "couple of years."
"There is still a lot of work to do," he said.
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