WHO urges China to be more cooperative as its probes to identify COVID-19 origin

WORLD – World Health Organization (WHO) is planning to rollout its next investigation phase to probe the origin of COVID-19 and it has urged China to be more cooperative during this next phase in reference to providing more raw data.

The WHO chief, Tedros, said that the organization is laying the groundwork for moving forward with fresh investigations into where Covid-19 came from following a previous attempt that saw WHO send a team of international experts who expressed lack of data as a hinderance into the investigation.

Tedros also added that the investigation is still open ended and nothing is out of context when making reference to where the virus originated from within the Asian state.

Speculations and theories about the origin of the virus have been around since the outbreak emanated from China with the most common theory speculating it ‘leaked from a lab’.

Data about the virus origin are still hazy and a number of scientific journals reported of cases emanating from as far a Paris and Milan, places far from Wuhan, China.

In one journal, Scientific Reports, the author talks of patient zero who was identified to be a 41-year-old accountant contrary to the previous theories that he was a 61-year old fish vendor at a sea food market.

The report highlights that this COVID-19 first patient was not a frequent visitor of Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market since he preferred getting his groceries at RT- Mart that was next to his home on the eastern bank of the Yangtze River.

He also hadn’t traveled outside of Wuhan in the days before his illness. If someone caught the novel coronavirus by crawling in a bat cave, it wasn’t him.

In the search for the pandemic’s origin, the trail officially ends with Patient S01, China’s first confirmed covid-19 case, whose sparse details were outlined in the joint WHO-China report released in March.

He was not a seafood vendor, bat hunter or lab scientist. He was an accountant surnamed Chen who shopped at a very large supermarket.

Despite most beliefs that the virus originated from Wuhan, a publication was also done in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal and it outlined about a 4-year-old boy who was suspected to have measles but when an oral swab test was done a few months later, he tested positive for COVID RNA.

This case might be proof that the virus was circulating in Europe long before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China since the boy presented to the hospital on December 5^th 2019, three days before patient zero in Wuhan exhibited COVID-19 symptoms.

In France, researchers claimed to have found the virus a month earlier before it became a disease of concern.

This was after a team from France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research and other institutes retrospectively examined over 9,000 serum samples banked as part of a public health project from November 2019 through March 2020.

Out of the tests done, the report says COVID -19 antibodies were detected from the blood samples but due to lack of enough funds, they were not able to back further into time and probe the case.

With all these unknown stories about the origin or corona virus, information is still not verifiable about its origin and not until a conclusive study from the WHO is established, it is still early to make conclusion that the virus came from ‘a fish vendor’ or ‘a lab leak’.

WHO cautions us to avoid spreading propaganda as more investigations are yet to be done to find out the origin.