COVID-19 Origins: The world may never know the origins of COVID-19, the virus that wreaked havoc across the world killing 6,784,392 people (as per the worldometer data till the filing of this report), as the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reportedly quietly suspended the investigations.
According to Nature, the WHO has abandoned its planned second phase of the investigations citing challenges in conducting crucial studies in China.
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Researchers Disappointed
"There is no phase two," Nature quoted Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. "The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins," she added.
Underlining that 'their hands are really tied', Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, said it was difficult to continue the planned study without access to China.
Research into the root cause of coronavirus outbreak was important as it could have helped scientists prepare better to tackle any such future outbreaks.
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The WHO had send a team of international experts in January 2021 to Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected. In March that year, the team has released a report outlining four possible scenarios for the spread of the virus. The most likely reason being SARS-CoV2 spread from bats to people through an intermediate species.
The first phase of the investigation was designed to lay the ground for an in-depth second phase of study to zero in the exact cause of the spread in China and other parts of the world. With the second phase investigations being ruled out now, the origin of COVID-19 is unlikely to be uncovered, at least for now.
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