WHO specialists visit Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan

Overview

• Post By : Kumar Jeetendra


• Source: PTI


• Date: 31 Jan,2021

The WHO experts, probing the origins of this COVID-19, on Sunday visited the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where the mortal coronavirus was presumably transmitted from animals to humans in the late 2019 and spiralled into a pandemic.

The wet market was where a range of live animals were traded before it was closed down following fears that the coronavirus had jumped to humans from bats or pangolins.

Very important site visits now – a wholesale marketplace initially & Huanan Seafood Market just now. Very informative & critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiology of COVID as it started to spread in the end of 2019, Peter Daszak, a zoologist with the US group EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO team, tweeted Sunday.

Though the market remained closed and cleaned up after the coronavirus cases surfaced in Wuhan in December 2019, the visit is still important to get a feel of what flow of goods, people were, Daszak was quoted by CBS news network.

The visit which took place amid tight security assumed significance as the market was widely presumed to be the source of the virus although Chinese official press in recent months questioned the premise.

While permitting the 14-member WHO group of international scientists to examine the source in Wuhan after considerable delay and controversy, China claims that the virus has emerged from various places in the world while it was the first to report it.

Although the Huanan seafood market has been sealed off, experts believe that there’s still plenty to see and experience there.

“(We hope to) understand the setting, see the places where cases were linked, reconstruct the initial event there, search for records of animals, products traded there. And possibly speak to a number of the retailers who were there at the time,” Peter Ben Embarek, who leads the WHO team, told the state-run Global Times.

Following the trip to Huanan Seafood Market, it’s to be seen whether the international team would be permitted to go to the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where former US President Donald Trump alleged that the virus may have escaped into the open.

Trump had asked China to permit a question amid stern denials from Beijing.

The itinerary of the WHO team hasn’t yet been announced. They had been expected to be in Wuhan for about a month.

Earlier the team of international experts, which was included by the World Health Assembly (WHA), the governing body of the WHO to probe the roots of the virus, had exchanges with medical workers and ancient COVID-19 instances in Wuhan, China’s National Health Commission said on Sunday.

The team, on a visit to Wuhan for scientific cooperation with its Chinese counterparts on tracing the roots of the novel coronavirus, visited several areas, including Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine and Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, where some of the earliest COVID-19 patients in Wuhan were treated, said Mi Feng, commission spokesman, was quoted as saying by the official China Daily.

They also visited a food distribution center for the Chinese city of Wuhan during the 76-day lockdown this past year.

The team, accompanied by large number of Chinese officials, also walked through segments of the Baishazhou market said to be one of the largest wet markets in the city.

On Saturday, they visited a museum exhibition devoted to the early history of the emergence of coronavirus.

China, while offering to collaborate with the WHO team, maintained that the visit is part of international study about the roots of the coronavirus rather than an investigation.

I want to stress that the exchanges and cooperation on origin-tracing between WHO specialists and Chinese professionals are part of a global study, not an investigation, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told media briefing in Beijing on Friday.

The WHO experts’ field work itinerary and plan for exchanges are crucial to serious, sensible scientific studies. Both sides will accompany the prior consensus and make science-based arrangements in light of the characteristics of the virus and the epidemic situation, he said.

So far as I know, the expert panel will visit all the places you called, he said, responding to a question whether China guarantees that the team receives complete access to scientific data and medical records.

Since journalists and officials are neither scientists nor experts after all, we will need to entrust the experts with the very professional task of origin-tracing, give them enough time, distance, trust and support to advance collaboration, and minimise unnecessary focus and disturbance, Zhao said.

According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, you will find 102,663,887 COVID-19 cases worldwide with 2,221,737 deaths.