Scientists investigating the source of the coronavirus have completed a massive examination and inquiry in China and have found “important clues” regarding the involvement of the Wuhan seafood market in the epidemic.
“Peter Daszak, a zoologist based in New York assisting the mission sponsored by the World Health Organization, said he expects the key results to be published before his scheduled return on Feb. 10. Speaking from Wuhan’s central city, where Covid-19 swelled in December 2019, he said the 14-member team operated with experts in China. They visited key danger zones and research centers to reveal “some real clues about what happened”.
More About The Study And Involvement Of Wuhan:
Investigators would like to know the pattern and the whole story behind the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread. It spread explosively in Wuhan before triggering the worst contagion in more than a century—whose nearest known relation came from bats 1,000 miles away. Daszak said the inquiry heralds a pandemic reduction turning point.
“It’s the beginning of hopefully a really deep understanding of what happened so we can stop the next one,” he said over Zoom late Friday. “That’s what this is all about — trying to understand why these things emerge so we don’t continually have global economic crashes and horrific mortality while we wait for vaccines. It’s just not a tenable future.”
In May, they asked for help from WHO. This was to “identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts.”
“We really have to cover the whole gamut of key lines of investigation,” Daszak said. “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.”
The study was “collaborative,” with Chinese colleagues helping mission researchers dig deeper for clues., Shi Zhengli, who for more than a decade has gathered and studied these viruses, told about the research. He was the one who earliest reported and studied cases of coronavirus in Wuhan.
“We sat down with them every single day and went through information, new data, and then said we want to go to the key places,” the British scientist said. “They asked for a list. We suggested where we should go and the people we should meet. We went to every place on that list and they were really forthcoming with that.”