End of quarantine for the WHO team.

The ten international investigators of the UN team left their hotel, Thursday, January 28, to start their work and go back to the origins of the Covid-19.

They arrived on January 14 in Wuhan, a city considered for the moment as the starting point of the pandemic.

Thursday morning, an AFP team kept at a safe distance saw the investigators board a bus waiting for them at the exit of the hotel where they were confined.

The vehicle took them to another establishment of a large international chain.

The WHO team will be able to participate in seminars and make field visits, the Chinese foreign ministry told reporters.

The investigation, which China took more than a year to organize, is extremely sensitive to the communist regime, which seeks to exclude any responsibility for the outbreak of the epidemic.

As the country managed to curb the contagion on its soil, the virus has spread across the globe, killing more than 2.1 million people.

The official Chinese report shows exactly 4,636 deaths, the vast majority of which in Wuhan (nearly 3,900), a city quarantined for 76 days from January 23, 2020.

Chinese government experts first explained that the epidemic appeared in a market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold alive.

The virus would thus have been transmitted from bats to another animal species before being transmitted to humans.

"All the assumptions are on the table"

The market in question has been closed for over a year and hidden behind a long blue fence.

But the Chinese media, controlled by the ruling Communist Party, gradually dismissed this theory for another, unproven, that the virus could have been imported into China, especially in frozen meat.

The WHO has ruled out the thesis of contamination through food but many Chinese now seem convinced that the pandemic is of American origin.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry himself suggested without evidence last year that the virus could have been introduced in Wuhan at the end of 2019 by American soldiers who came to participate in a sports competition.

Outside China, various theories have also circulated, including that of transmission of the virus, accidentally or not, from the Wuhan virology laboratory, where coronaviruses were experimentally manufactured.

Both the laboratory and the Chinese government have firmly denied this hypothesis, mentioned in particular by former US President Donald Trump.

For the time being, the WHO is careful not to decide.

"All the assumptions are on the table. It is clearly too early to come to a conclusion on where this virus originated, whether in China or outside China," the director in charge said last week in Geneva. health emergency issues at WHO, Michael Ryan.

A warning from Washington that offends Beijing

The researchers' program is not known and there is no guarantee that they will be able to visit the virology laboratory, nor the market at the center of the first hypotheses.

But after more than a year, many specialists fear that few traces of the origin of the virus remain to be discovered.

While the WHO was accused by Donald Trump of being under Beijing's orders, the new US administration pleaded Wednesday for the international investigation to be "clear and thorough".

“It is imperative that we get to the bottom of this pandemic's onset in China,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Washington will assess "the credibility of the investigative report once completed," she warned.

Beijing took this warning badly, with Chinese diplomacy rejecting "political interference" which could endanger "the search for serious scientific results".

In addition to the scientific aspects, Beijing has been accused of having delayed reacting to the first cases of contamination discovered in Wuhan in December 2019, or even earlier.

Last week, a committee mandated by the WHO estimated that "public health measures could have been applied more vigorously by Chinese local and national authorities in January" 2020.

Families of Covid-19 victims accused Beijing of trying to prevent them from coming into contact with WHO representatives and called on them not to be fooled.

The length of the investigation is not known, but China will enter its long Lunar New Year holiday on February 11, when the country virtually comes to a standstill for at least a week.

With AFP

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