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World Health Organization (WHO)
China

Coronavirus: WHO to send second team into China to seek source of Covid-19

  • As number of cases tops 10 million and WHO warns that the pandemic is far from over, an investigative team will go to China next week
  • Experts are sceptical that an inquiry more than six months after first outbreak can find definitive answers about the origin of the virus

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The Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, was the site of the first outbreak of the new coronavirus. Photo: Simon Song
Simone McCarthy
As the world marks the grim six-month milestone since Beijing confirmed the existence of the new coronavirus, the World Health Organisation announced it would send a team into China to investigate the source of the pathogen, which has now killed more than half a million people.

“We can fight the virus better when we know everything about the virus, including how it started,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday in Geneva. “We will be sending a team next week to China to prepare for that.”

The announcement comes six months after China first notified the WHO of an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia linked to a fresh food market in the central city of Wuhan, a disease later named Covid-19.

It was labelled a pandemic on March 11 and has now accelerated to a rate of a million new cases a week, according to the WHO. More than 10 million people have been infected and Tedros warned on Monday that the pandemic was far from over.

“With 10 million cases now and half a million deaths, unless we address the problems we have already identified at WHO, the lack of national unity and lack of global solidarity and the divided world, which is actually helping the virus to spread, as I said in my speech, the worst is yet to come.”

Tedros did not provide details on who would join the China-bound team. A previous WHO-China joint mission in February was made up of 25 medical specialists, including from WHO, seven countries and Hong Kong, and Chinese experts.

But investigations into the origins of the virus have become highly politicised in recent months, with some in the United States government calling the pathogen a “China virus” and suggesting without evidence that it could have escaped from a high-security laboratory in Wuhan that investigated viral causes of disease.

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