A group of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), established to find out the origin of COVID-19, admits the version of the appearance of the coronavirus outside of Wuhan, China. A member of the group Marion Koopmans, head of the Department of Virology at Erasmus University of Rotterdam, said this in an interview with journalists from the CGTN TV channel.
When asked about a study indicating the spread of the virus in Italy a few months before the first case of infection in Wuhan, the expert said that at this stage of the investigation nothing can be ruled out and all hypotheses should be considered impartially. “But it's important to start the investigation in Wuhan, where the big outbreak occurred,” Koopmans said.
Earlier, the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China announced that WHO experts will arrive in China on Thursday, January 14 to study the origin of the coronavirus. Last week, the head of the WHO, Tedros Adanom Ghebreyesus, reported that the organization's experts were faced with a ban on entering China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus. According to him, the authorities did not give the scientists the necessary permits.
Chinese authorities and scientists have repeatedly questioned the version of the origin of the virus in Wuhan, although it was first detected there. In particular, scientists pointed to evidence of the emergence of coronavirus in Italy, and several months before the first case of infection in Wuhan.
An outbreak of COVID-19 pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus was first recorded in December 2019 in Wuhan. On March 11, WHO announced that the situation could be characterized as a pandemic. According to the latest data, more than 90 million people are infected in the world.
