A year after the outbreak

China seeks to prove that it is not the origin of "Corona"

A man lying on a medical stretcher is infected with what the Chinese health authorities believe, with a mysterious disease before confirming the outbreak of "Corona".

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After nearly a year of doctors identifying the first cases of the new Corona epidemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it seems that China has begun to intensify its campaigns to question the origin of the global pandemic.

And government media published extensive reports about the Corona virus, which was found in frozen food import packages, and is not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and the country has also begun to investigate possible cases of the disease, which were found outside the borders of China before December 2019.

The official People's Daily newspaper said in a post on Facebook last week that “all available evidence indicates that (Corona) did not start in Wuhan, central China.” The agency quoted a former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control. And prevention, Zeng Guang, saying: “Wuhan was the place where (Corona) was discovered for the first time, but it was not the place where it originated.” A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, when asked about government media reports stating that the virus originated outside China, he said, is important to distinguish between the place where the virus was first discovered, and the place from which it moved across the barrier of other living species to infect humans.

Trace of origin

"Although China was the first to report cases of (Corona), this does not necessarily mean that the virus originated in China," said Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Ligian, in a press statement, adding that "tracking of origin is a continuous process that may include Many countries and regions ».

Chinese scientists went further when they submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet - although it has not yet been subjected to peer review - claiming that “Wuhan is not the place where the transmission of the SARS-Cove-2 virus occurred from one person to another,” indicating instead From that, the first case may be in the Indian subcontinent.

Claims that the virus originated outside of China do not receive much credibility by Western scientists. The director of the World Health Organization’s health emergency program, Michael Ryan, said last week that it is a matter of "only guesswork" to say that the disease did not appear in China for the first time. .

"It is clear, from a public health perspective, that you begin your investigations in the place where the human cases appeared for the first time," he said in a press briefing in Geneva.

Professor Jonathan Stewie, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says that the reports of the spread of "Covid" in Italy in the fall of 2019, based on samples from the cancer unit, appear "weak." "What seems certain is that the first recorded cases of the disease were In China".

While traces of corona have been found on frozen food packages, scientists believe that this represents a very low risk for a disease now believed to be transmitted largely through respiratory droplets.

Andrew Pecus, a doctor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says: "I have not seen any convincing data that the SARS-Covid-2 virus on food packages poses a high risk of infection."

But with the increasing human and economic losses of the epidemic, Beijing is keen to protect its reputation at home and abroad, as "Covid-19" has so far infected more than 60 million people, and killed nearly 1.5 million others, and since it recovered from the devastation caused by the outbreak in Its first appearance, China sought to cement its position abroad with medical aid.

Claims that the virus originated outside of China do not receive much credibility by Western scientists.

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