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Many questions remain to be resolved about the origin of this pandemic . Virtually all experts argue that the source of the new coronavirus is a bat, but the route it took to infect humans remains unknown. Wuhan's wet market was the epicenter of contagion. And the pangolin became the dubious main candidate to be that intermediate host. But more than six months after the world first heard about this coronavirus, it is still not even known when it could start to spread, nor who was Patient Zero.

For months, many countries have called for an independent investigation into the origin of the pandemic. Up to 211 nations signed a formal request to inquire on the ground, at the epicenter. In this time, much of the information that has come out from Beijing has been taken with tweezers. Powers such as the United States , Canada or Australia have not stopped doubting and pointing to the Asian giant, so they consider China's reluctance to share all its data.

Since Beijing, they have defended their "transparent and responsible attitude over and over again, unreservedly sharing scientific and medical information about the virus with the international community," President Xi Jinping said during the World Health Assembly in Geneva in mid-May. .

The role of the World Health Organization (WHO) has also been questioned. Especially by the Donald Trump government. The international organization already sent a group of experts to China in mid-February. Although in their conclusions they refuted what was said by Beijing and added some technical comments to the reports of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention . WHO experts focused more on praising the Asian country's management than on revealing important notes on the origin or transmission of the coronavirus .

Two experts as an advance guard

A new WHO delegation returned to China this weekend to try to shed some light on all the remaining questions about a pandemic that has already left more than 13.1 million infected and 572,000 dead worldwide. Yesterday China confirmed that two WHO experts arrived as an advance guard and that they are in Beijing working with their Chinese counterparts (officials from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Health Commission ) to identify the source of the coronavirus . However, details of the new WHO mission have barely been released.

The institution explained that the investigation would focus on the zoonotic (animal) source of Sars-CoV-2 and that it will send the two experts to Wuhan. The emissaries are an animal health specialist and an epidemiologist. Although their names and their agenda are unknown. A spokeswoman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Hua Chunying , said yesterday that her country and the WHO had reached a "fundamental consensus that origin tracing is a scientific topic that experts should study through research and cooperation. worldwide. "

Hua emphasized that this quest should go beyond China. "It is also the WHO's view that origin tracing is an ongoing process that is likely to concern many countries. WHO will make similar trips to other countries and regions in light of the real need," the spokeswoman added.

"When we say that a team is going to China, it does not mean that they have not been investigating. It does not mean that we are going to start from scratch," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week . From the organization they indicated that the visit would lay the groundwork for an international team to investigate the animal origins of the virus later. Although they did not reveal any date, the executive director of the agency's Health Emergencies Program , Mike Ryan , did say a few days ago that "Wuhan would be the best starting point" for the investigation.

Wuhan as a starting point

Once the trace of the origin of the pandemic begins in its theoretical epicenter, it remains to be clarified whether the Wuhan market is really the zero zone of infections. This place was brought into focus because city authorities said in January that the first Covid-19 patients who had entered hospitals had some connection to the market. Instead, in May, the director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu , said that animal samples taken from the Wuhan market were negative. "It is unlikely that the virus has arisen there," he said. Although many scientists say the lack of samples may be due to the fact that the market was disinfected several times before Chinese researchers arrived.

"China's invitation to WHO experts is to discuss science-based origin tracing," said Zhao Lijian , another spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, last week , who also noted that these same investigations were due to do in other countries of the world hit by the coronavirus. Zhou was the official who in March accused the US military of bringing the virus to Wuhan during the October World Military Games .

In all this time, the WHO has publicly praised China for its "rapid response to the new coronavirus" and thanked Beijing for its "transparency" and for "immediately" sharing the genetic map of the virus. Although recordings released by the Associated Press (AP) of various meetings of WHO members revealed that China did not actually share key information during the critical first days - the week of January 6 - of the pandemic.

The first trip in February of WHO experts was made by 12 international representatives - scientists and doctors from Germany , Canada , the United States , Japan , Nigeria , South Korea , Russia and Singapore - and a dozen other local experts from the Center for the Disease Control and Prevention in China. The genome was then known, 96% identical to that of a coronavirus that Chinese researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had identified in cave bats in the southern province of Yunnan .

The key, in the ACE2 receiver

The main difference was a six amino acid segment that allowed the virus to penetrate into human cells. Above all, there was an important detail, that the coronavirus could reach the ACE2 receptor, located in the lungs, a peculiarity shared with the previous SARS epidemic that hit China 17 years ago.

With all that information, the WHO reached Wuhan. At that time - February 22 - China added more than 600 new infections a day and the virus was spreading in more and more countries. A week later, the conclusions reached by Bruce Aylward , head of the expert mission, is that China was managing to control the epidemic, while the rest of the world was not yet ready. "The team has found that China's intervention measures have significantly changed the curve of the epidemic," they said from the agency putting.

Now, the new WHO team will seek to solve all the mysteries of this pandemic. Although many countries express doubts that China will provide all the information available to its scientists. Meanwhile, theories that the origin of the coronavirus is in Wuhan's P4 laboratory continue to feed from the United States, which formalized its withdrawal from the WHO last week because they maintain, in Trump's words, that the United Nations health agency United has been "complicit in China's lies." Yesterday, Trump's former campaign manager, controversial Steve Bannon , claimed that several Wuhan scientists had fled China and that they were working with the FBI to demonstrate that the Sars-CoV-2 had begun to spread after a leak. accidental in the lab.

A controversial statement comes a few days after CCTV, China's state television, aired the first image report from inside the questioned laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The director of this center, Yuan Zhiming , wanted to settle any accusation: "Without authorization, not a mosquito could enter the laboratory. None of our technicians could remove even a drop of water or a piece of paper. People who imagine that we could take animals out of the laboratory to sell them or that they could escape, they have no idea of ​​our operation. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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