WUHAN, China– The virus that causes Covid-19 probably jumped from one species to another prior to entering the human population and is highly unlikely to have actually leaked from a lab, a leader of a World Health Organization investigative group said at a press conference here.
In laying out the possibilities for the origin of the pandemic, the WHO group on Tuesday stated it was likewise possible that the infection might have been transmitted to people through imported frozen food, a theory heavily promoted by Beijing But the team said the most likely scenario was one in which the virus overflowed naturally from an animal into human beings, such as from a bat to a little mammal that then contaminated a person.
” Did we alter significantly the picture we had beforehand? I don’t believe so,” said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food-safety specialist who spoke on behalf of the WHO delegation.
The preliminary assessment came during a press conference at the end of a four-week objective, which included 2 weeks of quarantine, to Wuhan, the initial center of the pandemic. It comes more than a year after the infection first began spreading in China and around the world, eliminating more than two million people
After evaluating ecological samples from Wuhan’s Huanan Market, along with thousands of biological samples and case files from more than 200 regional hospitals, 17 Chinese and 17 WHO specialists said the market was one place where the infection started spreading rapidly, however cautioned that it was difficult to state how the virus showed up there.
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