The origin of the coronavirus: everything still points to you …

The head of the mission of the World Health Organization (WHO), Peter Ben Embarek, assured that after his investigation into the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, everything continues to indicate that SARS-CoV-2 originated from bats. They ruled out that the virus could have come from an accident in a laboratory.

“All the work that has been done to identify its origin continues to point to a reservoir of this virus or a similar virus in bat populations,” the Danish zoonosis expert told a conference. press in Wuhan on the results of the mission.

Ben Embarek, who said there was “no great evidence” of transmission of the virus before December 2019 in the Chinese city, pointed out two hypotheses as the most probable for its transmission to humans: via an intermediate animal host or via certain frozen foods in the cold chain.

Transmission from an animal is likely, but “it has not yet been identified,” Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese scientist group, said at the press conference.

About the theory that covid-19 could be generated in a Wuhan lab and expanded due to an error, WHO experts considered it “extremely unlikely”.

“The hypothesis of a laboratory accident is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into humans,” said Ben Embarek. “In fact, this is not part of the hypotheses that we suggest for future studies,” he added, downplaying a statement by former US President Donald Trump, who accused the Wuhan Institute of Virology of ” letting the virus escape, consciously or not.