Five years after the pandemic broke out that put the planet in check, The origin of covid remains a mystery: The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to demand more information from China, while Beijing assures that it has provided all the data it has.
In the city of Wuhan, home to more than 11 million people, life has long since resumed its course, although for many the covid is still a bad drink that is difficult to forget. The first cases were reported there in December 2019, and in January a confinement of more than two months was imposed to stop the rebound in infections of a virus that ended up leaving, according to the WHO, almost 800 million infections in the world and 7 million deaths.
“We are glad to be back to normal, but it is good to remember because many we don’t want to forget as if nothing had happened,” a resident tells EFE, Chu Jing.
Another Wuhanese, Liu Xuanremembers the uncertainty of those first days of confinement, with the streets completely empty and the number of infections and deaths on the rise: “It was difficult to find a bed in a hospital or get food, because even if you could go out there was practically nothing in the supermarkets.”
“At first it was all rumors and people didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know if we were infected and there was no way to know. The city was confined from one day to the next, people should have known in more detail what was happening to be able to take action,” he comments.
They were the first stages of a health crisis of still uncertain origin: last December the WHO itself once again asked Beijing for transparency about the genetic sequence of the first cases in the huanan market in Wuhan and the work carried out in the city’s laboratories.
According to the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Without complete data, “all hypotheses are up in the air,” including the theory that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a biosafety laboratory, which according to the agency’s scientists who visited China was the least likely of the hypotheses, but not disposable.
Huanan market sealed
Today, the Huanan market remains completely sealed and closely guarded by security guards. The two ships that made it up, separated by a street, they remain closed five years later.
In January 2020, shortly after the first cases of what was then called “mysterious pneumonia outbreak”, The market lowered its blinds after detecting the spread of infections among sellers and customers.
Just a day before, the Chinese Government had informed the WHO of the detection of the first cases in Wuhan, but by then the coronavirus It was already being transmitted at full speed.
For months, researchers completely clad in white protective equipment They were the only ones authorized to enter the premises to disinfect it and collect samples.
In Huanan there is no trace of them or of them. merchants either customers that once filled an open-air market where you could buy everything from fruits and vegetables to fresh meat, seafood, herbs and spices.
Only nearby establishments remain active, such as a large gallery which covers a hundred opticians.
No clues five years later
At the time, even the local press published that the market sold up to pheasants and snakes and scientists suspected that certain bats natives of southern China or the pangolin could have caused the transmission.
Meanwhile, other voices did not rule out that the pathogen escaped from a laboratorya hypothesis that still causes outrage in Beijing.
According to the WHO, China needs to share the genetic and molecular results that was kept on the animal market: “The virus has not been identified in animals or animal samples from the market, nor have we found animals that have infected humans,” the technical person responsible for the fight against the pandemic indicated last year. at the WHO, Maria Van Kherkove.
He believes that more studies are needed to track the animal that could have acted as an intermediary and answers to questions like where the animals came from.
“We also asked, without response, serological tests of the people who worked in the market or on the farms from which the animals came,” he says.
China defends that it has “actively supported global research” about the coronavirus, and that the experts the WHO sent “went everywhere they wanted to go.”
“They met all the people they wanted to meet and they saw all the materials they wanted to see,” the spokeswoman recently concluded. Mao Ning of the Foreign Ministry of the Asian country.
