We might never know the true origin of the novel coronavirus

• The World Health Organization will soon reveal more details about the planned investigation of the novel coronavirus's origin in China.
• The WHO negotiated the terms of the upcoming investigation with China over the summer, without revealing any of the conclusions to the public.
• A New York Times report reveals the first details of the WHO-China agreement, the investigations and field-work that will follow, and the access that international experts will get to China.

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At least 10 months have passed since the first novel coronavirus cases were diagnosed as pneumonia of unknown origin. Little did we know at the time that the pathogen would engulf the entire world in what was to become a pandemic of Spanish flu proportions. China’s initial response seemed more than satisfactory compared to SARS, even though reports quickly emerged detailing the censorship that impacted the response to the health crisis.

But as the illness moved to Europe and the US, it became clear that the virus behaved much differently than the flu. The evolution of the Wuhan COVID-19 outbreak suggested the pandemic could be contained with drastic measures that were easy to deploy in a regime like China’s. There was hope that even without draconian lockdowns like the one in Wuhan, countries would be able to manage their own coronavirus outbreaks. Italy, Spain, and the US then proved the contrary. In fact, even strict lockdowns were not as successful as China’s. The fact that the virus might have mutated into a more contagious version since hitting the Western countries didn’t help either.

As time went by, it became clear that China wasn’t eager to release the novel coronavirus's real origin story. Conspiracies ran wild on social media, suggesting the virus was created in a lab or escaped from one, and that China was trying to conceal it. But researchers proved in March that the virus was of animal origin, concluding that it passed to humans directly from the original host, or that it jumped to an intermediary before infecting the first human. China repeatedly denied allegations that foul play was at hand, but failed to provide much useful data.

It also became clear that the World Health Organization (WHO) could have acted more decisively in the first weeks of the pandemic, instead of praising China and deferring to its leadership. The organization still wants to find out how the coronavirus infected humans and negotiated a joint investigation with China over the summer. At the time, the WHO officials were not even allowed to visit Wuhan, and the world was told that WHO and China inked out the details of the upcoming investigation. After two months of silence, we’re now learning that the investigation will indeed proceed, but we might never learn what really happened.

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We might never know the true origin of the novel coronavirus originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 2 Nov 2020 at 19:00:40 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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