The team of experts dispatched by the World Health Organization to China, after months of discussions with Beijing, to investigate the origins of the Covid wished on Wednesday that these missions become common practice.
“Why not do this with every epidemic, as a routine?
[…] This should be normal ”
declared one of the participants in the WHO mission, the Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, at a press conference.
Read also: Covid: one year after the announcement of the pandemic, the WHO defends its action
She called on WHO members to discuss the possibility of systematically sending missions to each outbreak.
"So that it does not become a punishment, make it a routine,"
she insisted.
A preparatory mission went to China last summer but it then took several months to bring together both international and Chinese experts and plan the visit, with Beijing seeming very reluctant to let these specialists come.
After an abortive first departure, the mission was finally able to go to China only in January, a little over a year after the appearance of the coronavirus at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan.
The Chinese city of eleven million people is the first place in the world to report a case of Covid-19 at the end of 2019. This then unknown disease has since killed more than 2.6 million worldwide.
After four weeks on site, the international experts completed their mission in early February without reaching any definitive conclusions.
They believe that Covid-19 originated in bats and may have been transmitted to humans via another mammal.
These experts, who presented their first findings at a press conference in Wuhan on February 9, do not know where and when the pandemic actually started, even though no major outbreak has been reported in Wuhan. or elsewhere before December 2019.
They were to publish a preliminary report in February, but the project was finally abandoned in February, without any real explanation.
The final report is expected to be released the week of March 15, according to the WHO.
This decision came amid growing tensions between the United States and China over the conditions of access offered by Beijing to the experts during their investigation.
British zoologist Peter Daszak, another investigator dispatched by the WHO, has called on the international community to devote more energy to trying to predict where the next pandemics might appear, in the same way that countries try to predict where are going. arise from "existential threats" such as hurricanes and terrorist attacks.
One way to do this, he explained, is to systematically monitor areas where wild animals interact with livestock and humans.