| Guardian, you may have to register. |
An international team of World Health Organization experts has visited a hospital in Wuhan, China, that saw some of the first cases of Covid in December 2019, as part of an on-the-ground investigation into the origins of the virus that caused the pandemic.
They are also expected to visit a food market linked to one of the first cluster of cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility with a large archive of bat coronaviruses, and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control.
| It would seem that the cat is out of the bag. |
US officials in the Trump administration had suggested, without offering evidence, that the virus could have escaped from the institute.
| We were never given a reason to think otherwise and it did seem to be the most logical conclusion. That the WHO is finally allowed in Wuhan might lead a cynic to think that the Chinese have sufficiently scoured the place, the building, its records, and the brains of its scientists. |
| Several of them died when things were most challenging over there... |
Experts have said that was unlikely, and also overwhelmingly agreed that analysis of the new coronavirus’s genome ruled out the possibility that it was engineered by humans.
Maybe St. Fauci could lead them on a guided tour. He seems to have a more than passing familiarity with the lab
China has strongly opposed an independent investigation it could not fully control, and on Friday the foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, insisted that the delegation was not a probe. “It is part of global research, not an investigation,” he said in Beijing.
The WHO wrote on Twitter that the team had already requested “detailed underlying data” during online meetings held during a 14-day quarantine, and in their site visits expected to interview “early responders and some of the first Covid-19 patients”.
One member of the investigating team, Peter Daszak, said those meetings had begun at the hospital on Friday.
Zhang Jixian, the director of its department of respiratory and critical care, has been cited by Chinese state media as the first to report the novel coronavirus, after treating an elderly couple whose CT scans showed differences from typical pneumonia.
“Extremely important first site visit,” Daszak wrote on Twitter. “We are in the hospital that treated some of the first known cases of Covid-19, meeting with the actual clinicians and staff who did this work, having open discussion about the details of their work.”
The group are not able to go out freely in Wuhan, and will only be able to meet people on an itinerary set by their hosts.
| China is, after all, a communist country. |
“The team will go out but they will be bussed to wherever, so they won’t have any contact with the community,” the WHO spokeswoman, Margaret Harris, told a briefing in Geneva on Friday. “They will only have contact with various individuals that are being organised as part of the study.” 
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