Five years after the pandemic will break 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 Covid is still a bad experience 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, according to the WHO, almost 800 million infections in the world and 7 millions of deaths.
“We are glad to have returned to normal, but it is good to remember it because many of us do not want to forget as if nothing had happened,” a resident told EFE. Chu Jing.
Another Wuhan woman, Liu Xuan, remembers 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 locked down from one day to the next, people should have known in more detail what was happening to be able to take action,” he says.
They were the first bars of a health crisis of still uncertain origin: last December her own WHO once again asked Beijing for transparency about the sequence genetics 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 scientists from the organization that visited China was the least likely of the hypotheses, but not disposable.
Today, the Huanan market remains completely sealed and closely guarded by security guards. The two naves that made it up, separated by a street, continue closed five years later.
In January 2020, shortly after the first cases of the then-called “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” spread, the market closed its doors after the spread of infections among sellers and customers was detected.
Barely A day earlier, the Chinese Government had informed the WHO of the detection in Wuhan of the first cases, but by then the coronavirus was already being transmitted at full speed.
For months, researchers completely clad in white protective equipment were the only ones authorized to enter the facility to disinfect it and collect samples.
In Huanan there is no longer a trace of them or of the merchants or customers who once crowded 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 that houses a hundred opticians.
No clues five years later
At the time, even the local press published that even pheasants and snakes were sold in the market and scientists suspected that certain Bats native to southern China or the pangolin could have caused the transmission.
Meanwhile, other voices did not rule out that the pathogen escaped from a laboratory, a hypothesis that still causes outrage in Beijing.
According to the WHO, China needs to share the genetic and molecular results it collected 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.” , indicated last year the technical person responsible for the fight against the pandemic at the WHO, Maria Van Kherkove.
He believes that more studies are needed that follow the clue to the animal that may have acted as an intermediary and answers to questions like where the animals came from.
“We also asked, with no response, for serological tests from people who worked in the market or on the farms from which the animals came”he indicates.
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 saw all the materials they wanted to see,” Spokesperson Mao Ning of the Asian country’s Foreign Ministry recently settled.
