The WHO team of experts leaves their quarantine hotel in Wuhan.HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP
The WHO international mission in China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic is now ready to begin its work on the ground in Wuhan, the city of eleven million inhabitants in the center of this country that was the first global focus of covid.
The fourteen experts on Thursday completed the mandatory two-week quarantine that China imposes on those arriving from abroad, and which had kept them confined in a small hotel in the university area of the city.
So far, almost everything that surrounds this scientific mission, surrounded by controversy and political interests, subject to delays and various incidents, has developed in an opaque way.
It has not been announced which places they are going to visit during the two weeks that they plan to still stay in this city, beyond -probably- the Huanan seafood market, considered at first the "ground zero" of the pandemic .
Nor has it been disclosed with which Chinese experts they are going to meet, nor what data - environmental samples, hospital records, declarations of the first patients - they will be allowed to access directly.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on Thursday, through its spokesman Zhao Lijian, that international experts "will carry out activities that will include the holding of seminars and inspections" on site, "with the commitment to respect the relevant laws and regulations. in the country".
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Leaving his quarantine hotel, The Jade Hotel, was iconic.
Neither the National Health Commission - responsible, on the Chinese side, for the visit - nor the Wuhan municipal government, nor the WHO itself, nor the establishment confirmed when the scientists would leave.
“They left yesterday!”, One of the guards said to the waiting press.
None of them, upon leaving, gave statements to journalists.
This Thursday, their only transfer was to the hotel that they will occupy for the rest of their stay, a luxurious establishment of an international chain with extensive gardens on the shores of a lake, where areas have been specially defined for them.
Although they have completed fourteen days of quarantine, the strict regulations imposed by China to stop the spread of the virus provide for another fourteen under observation.
"During the second half of the visit, the team will be able to leave under strict medical supervision, continuous tests (for coronavirus) and restrictive measures," the regional director for Europe of the World Health Organization, Hans, said at a press conference. Kluge, in Geneva.
Throughout the two weeks of confinement, experts in areas from virology to food safety in markets have held daily meetings with each other and with their Chinese colleagues via video conference.
“Their Chinese counterparts have trained them in different areas.
Every day there have been many, many hours of presentations and data exchanges ”, Kluge assured.
"New phase, new priorities", tweeted the Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, one of the team members, hours before the end of the quarantine.
“Moving on to the next level of post-confinement health supervision, which began to be applied recently.
Hopefully, we can smell some fresh air! "
The origin of the pandemic has become a kind of boomerang between China and the United States, thrown time and again between Beijing and the Donald Trump Administration.
The real estate mogul's White House accused the Xi Jinping government of obscurantism, of not having done enough to prevent the virus from crossing borders and of unduly hindering the launch of the international mission.
It also fueled the hitherto unfounded theories that the pathogen came out of a Wuhan laboratory where bats were studied, the animal that most scientists believe the coronavirus jumped into humans, probably through a intermediate species.
China, in turn, says it has managed the pandemic flawlessly.
Also, after having considered at first that the Huanan market could be the origin of the disease, he now insists on the possibility that the coronavirus could arise in another country.
To defend that theory, he clings to several studies - which other experts have questioned - that point to the presence of the virus in other parts of the world months before it was discovered in Wuhan.
He also claims to have found traces of the pathogen in imported frozen foods on numerous occasions, a possible route, in his opinion, of the entry of the pandemic into the country.
The beginning of the new phase of the WHO investigation coincides with a new friction between the two major world economies on this mission, the first since Biden's arrival at the White House.
His spokesperson, Jen Psaki, assured that “it is imperative that we get to the bottom of the outbreak of the pandemic in China” and clarified that his Government will evaluate the credibility of the conclusions reached by the investigation “once (the report) is finished ”.
In turn, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian urged the United States to "respect the facts and science, and the hard work of the experts of the WHO mission," and rejected the "negative prejudices" against the work of experts.
"More and more studies, including those from the WHO, show that tracing back to the origin of COVID-19 is a process that will continue to spread to various regions [of the world] and outbreaks," Zhao said.
Political friction, questions about the information it will be able to access, the time that has elapsed and the objective difficulty of its goal - finding the origin of the disease - make it difficult to determine to what extent the mission will be able to achieve progress.
Its own members have called for caution and have warned that determining how the pandemic emerged may be a matter of years.
"There are no guarantees of answers", said this month the head of the WHO emergency program, Mike Ryan.
"It is a difficult task to fully establish the origins, and sometimes it can take two, or three, or four attempts to get it."
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