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January 11, 2021 A year has already passed since the news of the first Covid death in Wuhan in China.

But the virus, which at the time immediately identified itself as an atypical pneumonia, did not slow down its course, registering today a record of infections in the country: 103 new ones, a peak since last July 30, 82 of which in Hebei: the outbreak in the northeastern province.

Figures that make fear return again and that to the rest of the world imprisoned by 6 zero numbers of infected people, may seem derisory.



The new outbreak worries the authorities about the proximity to Beijing, where more than 500,000 people have been put in lockdown in the north-eastern district of Shunyi.

Beijing, which finally gave the go ahead for the arrival of the WHO international team of experts in charge of investigating where it all began. 



From January 14, in fact, the team of scientists should also include Wuhan, where only a few days ago hundreds of well-assembled people wearing masks celebrated the New Year in front of the rest of the world indoors. 



The stay in China of the WHO team, writes the South China Morning Post, should last six weeks, including the quarantine period to which the team members will be subjected, which includes scientists from the United States, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Vietnam, Germany and Qatar.



What will begin next Thursday is, for Beijing, the Chinese part of an investigation that "will have to carry out similar investigations in other countries and regions" where the virus has spread, commented the Foreign Ministry, without going into details of the program.

Satisfaction, after the controversy of recent days on the visa issue, also came from the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said he was impatient to "work with his Chinese counterparts on this critical mission to identify the source of the virus and the way of introduction to the human population ". 



 WHO does not intend to exclude any hypothesis on the origin of the virus, said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch scientist who will be in the team of experts sent to China and "it is possible" that the virus may have originated in a place other than where it was. identified for the first time, ie in Wuhan, Ma, he pointed out, "it is important to start with Wuhan, where we first learned of the situation."



China insists on the possibility that the virus may have entered the country from imports of frozen products: preliminary investigations on another outbreak, in the north-eastern city of Dalian, link it, according to local health authorities, to a cargo from Russia and the information on the sequencing of the coronavirus genome would then have given different information from that found in previous outbreaks.The resumption of infections, meanwhile, continues to worry the authorities, who have canceled the celebrations for the Lunar New Year in several provinces.



Particularly intense is the containment of the epidemic by the health authorities in the Hebei capital, Shijiazhuang: today sixteen new confirmed cases and five asymptomatic have been detected, and heavy restrictions on travel, isolated communities and villages and conduits have been introduced for days millions of tests.



The fear of the spread of the infection has extended to the epicenter of the epidemic, Wuhan, which has launched investigations into the contacts and places visited by two cases ascertained in Hebei, and after the first investigations a restaurant, a building, have been closed offices and three markets visited by the two coronavirus positive cases.