Wuhan (China) (AFP)
It is the world’s most pressing scientific enigma, but experts warn that a plausible answer to the origin of the coronavirus may never be found, after months of research marked by disorganization, China’s secrecy and grudges.
Saturday marked a year since China’s first confirmed coronavirus death, that of a 61-year-old man who used to go to the now infamous Wuhan fish market.
Almost two million deaths later, the pandemic is out of control around the world and has caused tens of millions of sick people, the collapse of the world economy and led to a multitude of disputes and reproaches between countries.
China, which has largely controlled the pandemic on its soil, continues to impede independent attempts to find out the origins of the virus and to answer the central question of how it was transmitted from animals to humans.
There is little doubt that the virus that brought the world to its knees due to the pandemic it caused, emerged in December 2019 in a fish market in the city of Wuhan, in central China, where wild animals were sold for consumption, and the pathogen is believed to have appeared in an unidentified species of bat.
But the investigations end there, as they stumble over and over again in a hodgepodge of clues suggesting that the virus could have originated previously, outside of Wuhan, or from conspiracy theories – encouraged by US President Donald Trump – that point out that the coronavirus would have been created in a Wuhan laboratory.
Establishing the origin is vital to be able to stop future outbreaks quickly, say virologists. That clue could set the tone for political decisions about whether to euthanize animal populations, quarantine affected people, or limit hunting of wild animals or human-animal contacts.
“If we can identify why [los virus] continue to emerge, we can reduce the underlying causes “that cause them, said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO focused on preventing infectious diseases.
– Doubts about the market –
China was praised for promptly reporting on the virus and for divulging its genetic sequence, compared to its behavior during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which it concealed at first.
But not everything has been so transparent.
Wuhan authorities first tried to cover up the outbreak and then wasted precious weeks denying human-to-human transmission.
From the beginning, the Chinese authorities stated bluntly that the outbreak started in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
But data from China from January 2020 shows that several of the first cases were unrelated to the market, suggesting that the origin of the virus could be elsewhere.
China’s version took a turn in March, when a disease control officer in that country, Gao Fu, said the market was not the source, but a “victim,” a place where the pathogen had simply been found. amplified.
Since then, China has been unable to tie up any loose ends, providing information about animal or environmental samples collected in the market with a dropper, which could be of great help to researchers, according to experts.
In addition, it has kept foreign specialists away for a long time. Now, a mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) is in limbo, after China denied them entry.
On Saturday, a Chinese health official said the country was “prepared” for the WHO team of 10 experts to visit Wuhan.
– Ni rastro –
What scientists will be allowed to see once there or what they hope to find a year later is also anyone’s guess. Experts say authorities could have destroyed or cleaned up crucial evidence, in an initial panic-driven response.
“Every outbreak follows a path. It’s chaotic and dysfunctional,” Daszak said.
“They didn’t do a great job in animal research at first,” he added.
“In some things they were quite open, but in others they were quite less open,” he said.
The reasons that led China to act with such secrecy are not clear, but the Communist Party – in power – has a long history of eliminating information that may be politically harmful.
Whistleblowers and citizen journalists who shared details online of what happened in the terrifying first weeks of the virus have been gagged or jailed.
Beijing may want to hide oversights or failures in regulation or research to avoid domestic embarrassments or global “delays” to come to light, said Daniel Lucey, an epidemiologist at Georgetown University.
The Wuhan market may not be the starting point, Lucey added.
According to him, the virus had already spread rapidly through Wuhan in December 2019, which would indicate that it would have been circulating long before.
This is because it can take months or even years for a virus to develop the mutations necessary to become highly contagious between humans.
The theory that it originated in the market “is just not plausible at all,” Lucey insisted.
“It happened naturally and it was many months before, maybe a year, maybe more than a year,” he added.
And if the doubts were not enough, in December China said that in Wuhan, at the beginning of the epidemic, there could have been up to 10 times more cases of covid-19 than those declared at that time.
In any case, the trail has been lost, and the clues that have emerged have only served to create more confusion, such as those that suggest that the virus could have existed in Europe and Brazil before the Wuhan outbreak, which were never confirmed but that China has taken the opportunity to divert attention and throw balls out.
– Esperanza –
Still, Daszak does not lose hope that the source of the virus can be found, especially after the defeat of outgoing US President Donald Trump in the November elections.
Daszak blames Trump for torpedoing cooperation with China by politicizing the virus, which he called the “Chinese virus,” and his administration for promoting the conspiracy theory that China created the coronavirus in a laboratory, something scientists have rejected.
“I am confident that we will be able to find out which bat species it came from and which path it followed,” said the president of the EcoHealth Alliance.
But others are not so sure.
Diana Bell, a wildlife disease expert at the University of East Anglia who has studied SARS, Ebola, and other pathogens, says targeting a single species as a possible source is wrong.
According to her, the main threat has already become clear: the trade in wild animals, which leads to a “fuel mix” of species trafficking, something that, as is known, is fertile ground for disease outbreaks.
“In fact, [qué especie sea] does not matter. We don’t need to know the source, we just need to leave behind that damn habit of mixing animals in the markets. We need to stop the trade in wild animals for human consumption, “he stated bluntly.
© 2021 AFP
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