The World Health Organization (WHO) is preparing to send a team to China to determine the origin of the new coronavirus, director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on Monday. "We can fight the virus better when we know everything about the virus, including how it started. We will send a team to China next week to prepare for this and we hope it will help us understand how the virus started. and what we can do in the future to prepare, "he said at a press conference.
First official lifts six months ago
Six months after China officially reported the disease in Wuhan in December, the new coronavirus has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide.
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The work of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has shown that the genome sequence of the new coronavirus is 80% similar to that of SARS, which caused a previous epidemic in 2002-2003, and 96% to that of a bat coronavirus. v The vast majority of researchers thus agree that the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, at the origin of the pandemic, was undoubtedly born in the bat, but scientists believe that it has passed through another species, not yet known, before being transmitted to humans.
Diplomatic tensions
It is this piece of the puzzle that the international scientific community and the WHO hope to discover in order to better understand what happened, to better target risky practices and avoid a new pandemic.
The debate on the origin of the virus also has diplomatic repercussions, the United States accusing the Chinese laboratory, in Wuhan, of being at the origin of the coronavirus, which Beijing denies.
"None of us could have imagined how our world, and our lives, would be turned upside down"
"Tomorrow, six months will have passed since the WHO received the first reports concerning a group of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in China," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "Six months ago, none of us could have imagined how our world, and our lives, would be turned upside down by this new virus," he added.
"We all want it all to end. We all want to get on with our lives. But the harsh reality is that it is far from over," said the head of the WHO. He also reiterated, as last week, that the pandemic is "accelerating" now.