Tracking the origins of the coronavirus
Peter Daszak was a member of the World Health Organization’s investigative research team that recently traveled to Wuhan, China, to try to uncover the origins of the coronavirus. An animal disease specialist, he spoke with our science reporter James Gorman about the mission.
Did you learn anything from this trip that you didn’t know before?
From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market [the seafood market where the initial outbreak occurred last year]? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there?
When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they’ve done the analysis, and we’ve got new information. It was extremely useful.
The W.H.O. experts visited the market in Wuhan during their fact-finding mission. Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
What can you say now about the market and what you saw?
The market closed on the 31st of December or the 1st of January, and China C.D.C. sent a team in of scientists to try and find out what was going on. It was a very extensive study, swabbing every surface of this place. We knew early on that there were 500 samples collected, and there were many positives, and in that sampling were some animal carcasses, or meat. But there was not really much information publicly about what had been done. So we got all that information. And that, to me, was a real eye-opener.
They’d actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work.
Do you have a particular animal that you suspect right now as an intermediate link, more strongly than others?
It’s too up in the air. We don’t know if civets were on sale. We know they are very easily infected. We don’t know what the situation is with the mink farms in China or the other fur farms, like raccoon dogs, even though they’re normally farmed in a different part of China. That needs to be followed up on, too.
The New York Times
