WUHAN, (CHINA) – A team of experts from WHO, investigating the origins of COVID-19 on Friday visited a hospital in the Chinese city of Wuhan that was one of the first to treat patients in the early days of the outbreak.
The team went to the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, after meeting with Chinese scientists earlier in the day,.
According to media, Zhang Jixian, director of the hospital’s department of respiratory and critical care, is the first to report the novel coronavirus, after treating an elderly couple in late 2019 whose CT scans showed differences from typical pneumonia.
The WHO-led team was released from two weeks of quarantine on Thursday. While the exact itinerary has not been announced, the team plans to visit labs, markets and hospitals during its remaining two weeks in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first identified in late 2019.
The WHO has sought to manage expectations. “There are no guarantees of answers,” its emergency chief, Mike Ryan, said this month.
“It is important to remember that the success of this mission and origin-tracing is 100% depending on access to the relevant sources,” Thea Fischer, a Danish member of the team, told Reuters on Thursday.
“No matter how competent we are, how hard we work and how many stones we try to turn, this can only be possible with the support from China.”
