WHO team discovers signs of wider COVID outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, says reports

World Health Organisation (WHO) team who visited Wuhan in China to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic informed that after looking into the origins of Coronavirus in the country, they discovered that signs of the outbreak were much wider in the city in December 2019 than previously thought. According to local media reports, the investigators are urgently seeking access to hundreds and thousands of blood samples from Wuhan that China has not so far let them examine. 

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WHO team in Wuhan, China

The lead investigator of the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, while speaking to CNN said that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time that there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan in December 2019. 

WHO's team had arrived in China in January 2021 and since then it has spent 4 weeks looking into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak. The team had also met the first patient of COVID-19, who Chinese officials said was infected on December 8, 2019. The CNN said, in a report, that the slow emergence of detailed data gathering on the WHO recent trip may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease that it may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.

Embarek, who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN: "The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding." 

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Earlier on February 9, the WHO team said that there is no evidence of Coronavirus in any animal species in China. Meanwhile, the US on Saturday raised concerns over the possibility of the Chinese government''s interference in the World Health Organisation's recent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan.

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"We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them," said Jake Sullivan, US National Security Adviser.

He stressed on the importance of an investigation that is "free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government" into the origin of COVID-19.

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