On Sunday, the team visited the wet market that is thought to have been at the heart of the spread of the disease: the now-disinfected and closing Huanan seafood market in Wuhan city, where doctors identified the first group of pneumonia-like illnesses in mid-December 2019.. The market has become a reported ‘ground-zero’ for COVID-19, even though later studies suggest it may have started elsewhere.
Peter Ben Embarek, WHO team leader and food safety expert, told CNN “Even though the area has been partially disinfected, all the shops are there – and the equipment is there. It will give you a good idea of the condition of the site. market for maintenance, infrastructure, hygiene and the flow of goods and people. ” The team had the opportunity to talk to locals and staff, Ben Embarek said. He warned that it was too early in their investigations to make decisions.
“Obviously something happened in that market,” said Ben Embarek. “But it could also be that other places had the same responsibility, and that one was chosen because some doctors were smart enough to link a few sporadic issues together.”
Another member of the WHO team, Professor Thea Fisher, told CNN that she was surprised by how “useful” it was to see a market that had been deserted for the past year. “We had some really good public health people with us who had been doing some of the environmental sampling at the market. … explaining to us exactly where they took the samples from the ventilation system.”
“It’s a surprise to see a place,” said another team member, ecologist and optometrist Peter Daszak. “All the stores are empty, the equipment is still there. It’s a little more likely.”
Ben Embarek also revealed that Chinese officials provided the WHO team with important data about flu, or flu-like diseases, that China’s pandemic surveillance systems saw in and around the Hubei region in the months before the revolution. December 2019.
“We have data for the whole province and also further afield – looking at data from other neighborhoods and going back several months … There’s a lot of stuff to look at. It’s important to possible in previous months [the outbreak] go down to a much lower level, and try to pick up signals, and see if there was anything that we could do to connect it, “he said.
Ben Embarek described the approach of Chinese authorities, which had been criticized earlier for the slow admission of a WHO team, as “obvious.”
“We’ll see what we ask to see,” he said, adding that the Chinese authorities had been flexible and hoped for future rounds after this first 14-day mission.
But Fisher said the work was sometimes complicated by the size of the group which visits some in China. “I hope that with some of the tours in the coming days we can go in smaller groups. It’s harder to build a relationship [with an interviewee] in a very short time … if you have 50 people sitting around listening. “
Nick Paton Walsh reported from London and Sandi Sidhu from Hong Kong.