A joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese expert mission on Tuesday said that there is no sufficient evidence to determine that coronavirus was present or was being spread in China’s Wuhan city before December 2019. The WHO has formed a team of experts who had last month reached China to investigate the origins of the Covid19 pandemic in Wuhan city that has taken millions of lives across the world.
"There is no indication of the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 in the population of the period before Dec 2019," said Liang Wannian, head of the China team, at a press briefing. He added that there was "not enough evidence" to conclude if the virus had spread in the city before December.
The research is to find whether coronavirus had any previous history and was circulating earlier than December 2019, said Ben Embarek, head of the WHO mission.
WHO experts team has also dismissed the controversial theory that Covid-19 came from a laboratory in China’s Wuhan city. "The laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population," said Embarek.
“Therefore is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies,” said Embarek, adding that they have failed to identify the animal source of the virus.
Experts believed that the virus originated in bats could have transmitted to humans through another mammal.
While transmission from animals was the likely route, so far "the reservoir hosts remain to be identified", Liang Wannian said. He further informed that the virus can travel long-distance and on “cold chain” as well.
The scientists also believe that the virus that causes Covid-19 could have been circulating in other regions before it was identified in Wuhan city.
The WHO Covid investigating team arrived in Wuhan on 14 January and after two weeks of quarantine, had taken a survey of the important site to trace the root cause of the virus like the Huanan seafood market, the location of the first known cluster of infections, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been involved in coronavirus research.
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The world and many top leaders across the world have accused China that it kept everybody in dark about the virus spread and alleged that the virus was made human-made in a lab.
Former US President Donald Trump and Australia had staunchly demanded a probe into the origins of the Covid virus.