Passangers and an airport staff wearing facemasks amid the concerns over the COVID-19 coronavirus walk in a nearly empty terminal at Beijing Capital International Airport on April 13, 2020. WHO experts told AFP in an interview Saturday they had not received access to enough raw data while in China probing the pandemic’s origins, saying more was needed to detect possible early COVID-19 cases.
The four-week WHO mission to China to uncover the origins of the coronavirus wrapped up earlier this week with no conclusive findings. The expert team determined that there were no signs of large clusters of Covid-19 in Wuhan or elsewhere prior to December that year, but did not rule out sporadic cases spreading before that.Ben Embarek said the team would have been keen to have access to raw data about earlier cases of illnesses, including pneumonia, flu and fever, that could conceivably have been Covid.
“We are trying to understand that process of getting from 72,000 down to 92”, he said, saying access to the raw data requested would make it possible to apply “less stringent criteria so we have a larger number to work with.”John Watson, a British epidemiologist and a member of the team, acknowledged that there was a “full and frank discussion” about access to the data, but said focusing too much on that aspect would be unfair.
“This was NOT my experience on @WHO mission,” he said in a tweet, adding: “We DID get access to critical new data throughout.”The team members have had to walk a diplomatic tightrope, with the US urging a “robust” probe and China warning against politicising the issue.