China

Inside the investigation into how Covid-19 began – podcast


A World Health Organization team of international experts tasked with investigating the origins Covid-19 will arrive in China this week. Scientists want to determine how the virus jumped species into humans. A year into the pandemic there are still many unanswered questions over the origins of the novel virus.

The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, tells Rachel Humpheys about what the WHO has uncovered over the past 12 months and the challenges it has faced. Ideally, door-to-door detective work, talking to the first people to fall ill and their families and colleagues, would have begun in Wuhan in January. But the city was in lockdown, its streets deserted. And the rest of the world had not yet understood what it was facing, Bruce Aylward, the Canadian doctor and epidemiologist appointed by WHO to lead its fact-finding mission to China in early February told Sarah in a recent phone call.

Now, Sarah says, the team tasked with the latest investigation has an even greater task on its hands as the lapse in time will make it harder to track down certain clues that might help answer where the pandemic started. It’s crucial we find these answers however, not only to deal with this pandemic, but to stop something like this happening again.





Workers carry a container of coronavirus test samples outside of a residential neighborhood in Shijiazhuang in northern China's Hebei Province





Photograph: Mu Yu/AP

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