New Delhi: The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday announced that a team of international experts will be travelling to China next month, to help investigate the animal origins of COVID-19. The UN health agency has been working for months to send the team of 10 international experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, to China, where the virus first surfaced last year in the month of December.
The announcement of the international team’s visit comes over a year into the novel coronavirus pandemic, that has killed more than 1.6 million people and infected over 73 million worldwide, however, the question of where the virus originated from and how it first crossed over to humans still remains a mystery.
Speaking to news agency AFP, WHO spokesperson Hedinn Halldorsson said, “I can confirm that this will take place in January.”
Earlier in July, an advance team was sent to Beijing to lay the groundwork for the international probe. But, until now it is not quite clear when the larger team of scientists would be visiting China to begin epidemiological studies to try to identify the first human cases and their source of infection.
Initially, scientists were of the belief that the deadly virus jumped from animals to humans at a market selling exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected late last year. But, on second thought, experts have now opined that the market may not have been the origin of the outbreak, but rather a place where it was amplified.
Even though it is widely assumed that the virus originally came from bats, but till date, the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between bats and humans remains unknown. In October, the international experts had their first meeting with their Chinese counterparts, but only virtually.