WUHAN: World Health Organisation inspectors on Wednesday visited a laboratory in China’s Wuhan city at the heart of a controversial theory that it could have been the source of the coronavirus.

The inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducts research on the world’s most dangerous diseases, will be one of the most-watched stops on the team’s probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The sensitive mission, which China had delayed throughout the first year of the international health crisis, has a remit to explore how the virus jumped from animal to human. But questions remain over what the experts can hope to find after so much time has passed.

The convoy of cars drove past security to enter a virology institute shrouded in mist on Wednesday morning.

WHO team member Peter Daszak told reporters that the team was “looking forward to a very productive day and to asking all the questions that we know need to be asked”.

Most scientists think Covid-19 — which first emerged in Wuhan and has gone on to kill more than two million people worldwide — originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal. But there are no definitive answers so far.

The WHO experts stayed inside the institute for nearly four hours, before driving away without stopping to talk to media waiting outside.

Police in black uniforms and face masks lined the road to separate the crowds of reporters from the cars.

According to the state-run Global Times, the team also visited the P4 lab — Asia’s first maximum-security lab equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) such as Ebola.

There was speculation early in the pandemic that the virus could have accidentally leaked from the biosafety lab in Wuhan, although there was no evidence to back up that theory.

Former US president Donald Trump and his supporters seized on those rumours and amplified them with conspiracy theories that China deliberately leaked the virus.

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo insisted last year that there was “significant evidence” that the virus came from the lab, while releasing no proof and acknowledging that there was no certainty.

China has faced criticism at home and abroad for playing down the initial outbreak and concealing information when it first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019. But Daszak told journalists on Tuesday the mission was proceeding “very well”, as the group was driven into an animal disease control centre.

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2021