Wuhan, the mystery five years later
Five years after the pandemic that put the planet broke out, the origin of the COVID-19 continues to be a mystery: the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to claim more information from China, while Beijin says it has already delivered all the data available.
In the city of Wuhan, home of more than 11 million people, life has long resumed its course, although for many Covid is still a hard drink difficult to forget. There the first cases were notified, in December 2019, and in January a confinement of more than two months was imposed to stop the influence of infections of a virus that ended up leaving, according to the WHO, almost 800 million infections in the world and Seven million deaths.
“We are glad to have returned to normal, but it is good to remember it because many do not want to forget as if nothing had happened,” says a resident, Chu Jing.
Another Wuhanesa, Liu Xuan, recalls the uncertainty of those first days of confinement, with the completely empty streets and the box of infegios and dead dead: «It was difficult to find a bed in a hospital or get food, because even if you could leave not There was practically nothing in supermarkets ».
«At first they were 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 overnight, people had to have known more details what was happening to take measures, ”he says.
They were the first bars of a health crisis of signs still uncertain: last December the world health entity itself requested Beijing Transparency about the genetic sequence of the first episodes in the Huanan market in Wuhan and the work carried out in the city laboratories.
According to the WHO director, Tedros Adhanom ghebreyesus, without complete data “all hypotheses are in the air”, including the theory that the coronavirus accidentally escapes some biosecurity laboratory, which according to the scientists of the organism that They visited China was the least probable of the hypotheses, but not discharge.
The market, sealed
Today, the Huanan market is still completely sealed and jealously guarded by security guards. The two ships that made it up, separated by a street, are still closed five years later.
In January 2020, shortly after the first cases of the then called “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” were spread, the market lowered the blind after detecting the propagation of infection in sellers and customers.
Just one day before, the Chinese government had informed of Wuhan detection of the first cases, but at that time the Coronavirus was already transmitted at full speed.
For months, researchers completely wrapped in white protection teams were the only ones authorized to enter the enclosure to disinfect and collect samples.
In Huanan there is no trace of them or merchants or customers who once crazy an outdoor market in which they could be purchased from fruits and vegetables to fresh meat, seafood, herbs and spices. Only surrounding establishments are active as a wide gallery that covers a hundred optics.
At the time, even the local press published that in the market they were sold to Faisanes and Snakes and scientists suspected that certain native bats from southern China or the Pangolin could have caused the transmission. Meanwhile, other voices did not rule out that the pathogen escapes a laboratory, a hypothesis that still causes indignation in Beijing.
According to WHO, China is needed to share the genetic and molecular results that were kept on the animal market: “The virus has not been identified in animals or markets of market animals, nor have we found animals that have infected humans” , the technical head of the fight against pandemic in the world entity, Maria Van Kherkove said last year.
He believes that more studies are needed to follow the track of the animal that could have acted as an intermediary and answers to questions such as where the animals came from. “We also ask, without response, serological evidence of the people who worked in the market or in the farms from which the animals came,” he says.
China defends that it has “actively supported world research” on the Coronavirus, and that the experts that the organization sent “went to all the places that wanted to go.”
“They met all the people who wanted to meet and saw all the materials they wanted to see,” said spokeswoman Mao None of the Chancellery of the Asian country. Even so, although the world prefers to forget, the enigma of the COVID-19 is still not deciphered.
(tagstotranslate) China
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