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A team of experts from the World Health Organisation on a field trip to the Wuhan city of China for probing the origin of novel Coronavirus, have found “important clues” about a seafood market’s role in the outbreak of the deadly virus. ALSO READ | Covid-19 Update: Oxford Vaccine Appears Less Effective Against South African Variant, Says Report
According to a bloomberg report, a New York-based zoologist Peter Daszak assisting WHO said the 14-member group visited key hot spots in China to uncover “some real clues about what happened.”
Wrapping up a lengthy investigation in China, Daszak said the investigation heralds a turning point in pandemic mitigation. He said that the investigators are probing, what really happened, how the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread explosively in Wuhan, why these things emerg and how can we stop the next one so we don’t continually have global economic crashes and horrific mortality while we wait for vaccines.
“We really have to cover the whole gamut of key lines of investigation. To be fair to our hosts here in China, they’ve been doing the same for the last few months. They’ve been working behind the scenes, digging up the information, looking at it and getting it ready,” Daszak said, as quoted in the report.
Citing the group’s findings as confidential, he said that genetic sequencing data are helping investigators identify threads linking the information across patients and wildlife.
Revealing insights from his study, Daszak further said that the Huanan fresh produce market in central Wuhan suggest that it might have been where the virus jumped from animals to humans. The market sold mostly seafood, as well as meat that included freshly prepared wildlife.
“We know now what we didn’t know then — that for every sick case, there were others that were asymptomatic or difficult to distinguish from a cold or cough,” Daszak said. “And so it’s not unexpected that there would have been other cases other than ones that got into hospital. But how many others, when did this start? That’s the sort of thing we’re still working on,” Daszak reportedly said.
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