Covid-19 origin: WHO expert says wildlife trade most likely pathway for coronavirus to arrive in Wuhan
CNNHong Kong CNN — The wildlife trade in China is the most likelypathway through which Covid-19 was able to spread from the original animal source, possibly bats, to humans, according to one of the authors of a long-awaited World Health Organization report on the origin of the virus. The report, expected to be released on Tuesday after repeated delays, will include “multiple hundred pages, with lots of data, lots of new facts and information,” said Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team of international experts who visited the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, earlier this year. According to Daszak, Chinese and international experts agreed that the most likely path the virus took was from an original bat host, which then infected an intermediary in southern China’s wildlife farms. On the ground in Wuhan, Daszak and other WHO experts visited the Huanan market and found that it not only sold seafood, but also “wildlife and wildlife products, whole carcasses of animals and live animals of different types” from farms across China. “So what we found, I think, is pretty important evidence of a way the virus could have emerged from rural China into a big city like Wuhan and led to an outbreak,” Daszak said.