WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the “international team” would be deployed to Wuhan, the city where the delayed pandemic reportedly erupted last year. Tedros said the “terms of reference” were drafted through WHO and China, but did not specify.
“The complex WHO team that visited China has now completed its project to lay the groundwork for new joint efforts to identify the origins of the virus,” he said at a press conference. “Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to identify the possible source of infection in the first cases.”
He said the “evidence and assumptions” generated through the paintings would “lay the foundation for longer-term studies.”
The comments came amid a growing number of pandemic victims in the United States, Brazil and India, as researchers seek to explain the origins of the virus and how it was able to move from animals to humans backwards last year.
Dr Michael Ryan, WHO’s head of emergency, reported on “gaps in the epidemiological landscape” and said it would assess what studies to conduct and what knowledge to collect. He said the two-person complex team had returned from China and had still been “interrogated.”
“The genuine trick is to pass on to the human teams what happened first and then systematically go back in search of the first sign that crossed the barrier of human animal species,” Ryan said. “Once you sense where this barrier has crossed, you move on to more systematic studies on the animal side.”
The WHO press office, contacted through The Associated Press after the press conference, provided key points on the terms of reference, whether they are made public, or imply the length of the foreign equipment or when it could be sent to China. Training
He said team members had “extensive discussions” with their Chinese counterparts on the three-week scale and had video discussions with virologists and other Wuhan scientists, adding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April, U.S. President Donald Trump said he had noticed evidence supporting the theory that the lab was behind the virus.
On Sunday, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s senior coronavirus adviser, said the virus is “extraordinarily widespread” in the United States and that infections in urban and rural areas of the United States mark a “new phase” of the country’s pandemic.
Ryan, who was asked to comment on such comments, said he did not believe the goal was to “create the feeling of a new Phase Array … but remind all states that the disease has never gone.”