WHO probe team in China exits Wuhan quarantine
The team is preparing to end their two-week quarantine on Thursday
The World Health Organization (WHO) team have come out of quarantine and is all set to start on-the-ground investigations into the origins of the coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The scientists will begin interviewing people from research institutes, hospitals and the seafood market linked to the initial outbreak as their esearch will rely upon evidence provided by Chinese officials, BBC reported.
Earlier on 14 January, the group of 13 experts had arrived in Wuhan, after months of negotiations between the WHO and Beijing.
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The team is preparing to end their two-week quarantine on Thursday, although in isolation, they had been in video calls with each other and Chinese scientists.
On Thursday afternoon they exited their hotel and boarded a bus without speaking to journalists. Earlier in the day members of the team tweeted about the end of their quarantine, including pictures of letters certifying they had completed medical isolation.
"New phase, new priorities," tweeted Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans.
Before their arrival, the WHO had said its investigators were denied entry into China after one member of the team was turned back and another got stuck in transit. But Beijing later said it was a misunderstanding.
Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019, but China has been saying for months that it is not necessarily where the virus originated.
State media has recently suggested the pandemic might have begun outside of China - Spain, Italy or even the US - and have also carried claims that the virus has been entering the country through frozen food imports, though experts have cast doubt on this.
In an earlier interview with the BBC, Professor Dale Fisher, chair of the global outbreak and response unit at the WHO, said hoped the world would consider the investigation in Wuhan a scientific visit. "It's not about politics or blame but getting to the bottom of a scientific question," he said.
Dr Fisher added that most scientists believed that the virus was a "natural event".
It was initially believed the virus originated in a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat. It was suggested that this was where the virus made the leap from animals to humans.
