There have been numerous news circulating the internet about the origin of the COVID-19 which some said came from a lab in Wuhan, China however a senior Chinese epidemiologist has a different overview about the matter.
In a recent report, the senior epidemiologist aid the US should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of COVID-19 as a recent study is said to have shown that the disease was already spreading locally as early as December 2019.
The new study was published this week by the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) stating that at over seven people in five U.S. states were infected with SARS CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19) weeks prior to the official declaration of the first case in the country.
A China-World Health Organization (WHO) joint study published in March said COVID-19 most likely originated in the country’s wildlife trade, with the virus passing into humans from bats via an intermediary species.
However, China had blamed overseas contamination as the source of COVID-19 while a number of foreign political figures have all called for a thorough investigation into the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory.
China’s CDC chief epidemiologist Zeng Guang told the state-owned tabloid Global Times that attention should shift to the US which was slow to test people in the early stages of the outbreak and also home to many biological labs.
“All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny,” he was quoted as saying.
With China’s continuous denial of any wrongdoing as pertaining to the outbreak, the country’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that the outbreak must have had multiple origins and advised other countries to co-operate with the WHO.
The true origin of COVD-19 is no longer a matter of science investigation but a political one predominantly between the US and China and many in the west have stated that a Wuhan lab might have been responsible for the leak of the virus.
China’s lack of transparency in how it handled the matter had been criticized globally especially when it comes to disclosing data about early cases as well as the viruses studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A report by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that it was plausible that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
There were previous studies that raised the possibility of the disease to have been spreading in Europe as far back as September of 2019 even though experts said it didn’t necessarily mean it did not originate in China where many SARS-like coronaviruses have been found in the wild.