WHO team visits Wuhan museum on early COVID-19

On their second full day of work on Saturday, members of a World Health Organisation team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited a museum exhibition in Wuhan dedicated to the early history of COVID-19. Also Saturday, the team visited Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, one of the city’s first to deal with patients in early 2020 suffering from a then-unknown virus.

The team’s first face-to-face meetings with Chinese scientists took place on Friday, before the experts who specialize in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.

The Geneva-based WHO said late on Thursday on Twitter that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets like the Huanan Seafood Market linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and laboratories at facilities like the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

The mission has become politically charged, as China seeks to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. A single visit by scientists is unlikely to confirm the virus’s origins. Pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.