WHO visits the Wuhan hospital where the first case of coronavirus was treated

Experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) who traveled to China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus outbreak visited the Wuhan hospital in Hebei province on Saturday, where the first patients with Covid-19 were treated. .

Neither the expert panel nor the Chinese authorities provided details about the mission, which remains a secret and is very politically sensitive as the world has its eyes on China for its alleged late reaction to the first cases.

The team members, who respected 14 days of quarantine until Thursday, went, escorted and away from the press cameras, to the Jinyintan hospital in Wuhan, the news agency reported. AFP.

This establishment is the first to have welcomed patients suffering from what was then considered a mysterious virus at the end of 2019.

This visit was "an important moment to speak directly with the doctors who were there at that critical moment in the fight against covid," wrote Peter Daszak, one of the members of the mission, on Twitter.

However, doubts remain about the interest of the elements that researchers can collect more than a year after the start of the pandemic. This Friday, the first day of its mission in the field, the WHO tried to moderate expectations about its results.

"I would like to warn everyone: the success of an investigation into the transmission from animals to people does not necessarily mean finding the origin (of the pandemic) in the first mission," Michael Ryan, director of emergency operations, told reporters. at WHO.

Despite the "very busy schedule" of the team of experts in Wuhan, Ryan did not elaborate on the program, but did mention visits to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronaviruses were handled, and to a local market, where they sold live exotic animals and from where the virus could be transmitted to people.

The government of former US President Donald Trump hypothesized that the Covid-19 virus could have left the Institute of Virology infecting researchers, a theory that for now is not supported by any scientific evidence.

China, for its part, maintains the theory that the virus has entered the country through frozen food, something of which there is no evidence. According to official figures, only two people have died of coronavirus in China since mid-May. In total, the Asian country officially registered 4,636 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. This figure contrasts with the more than 2.1 million deaths in the world. In recent weeks, China has recorded small outbreaks of infection in parts of the north and the periphery of Beijing.