A team of experts from the WHO reportedly landed in Wuhan, China on Thursday 14th January to resume a long-overdue mission: investigating the origin of the coronavirus over the next few weeks.
Chinese state broadcaster CGTN showed the arrival of the WHO expert team’s plane from Singapore. Peter ben Embarek, Head of the expert team for the mission, said they would start work after completing a two-week quarantine at a hotel in accordance with China’s border requirements. The team would mainly stay in Wuhan, he told Reuters in an interview from Singapore on Wednesday.
“And then after two weeks, we will be able to meet our Chinese counterparts in person and go to various locations that we want to visit,” he said. He warned that the mission
“could be a very long journey before we get a full understanding of what actually happened.”
Beijing argues that, although Wuhan was the location of the first detected cases, it is not necessarily where the virus originated.”I don’t think we will get a clear answer immediately after this initial mission, but we will keep working. The idea is to get progress from a number of studies that were designed and concluded months ago so that we can better understand what’s going on,” Embarek added.
The journey of a team of experts from the WHO has begun over a year after the pandemic began. This mission has sparked political tension over allegations that Beijing was trying to thwart the endeavor.
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