The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday that the lack of knowledge that still exists about the origins of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 threatens “the ability” to prepare for “future pandemics” .
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke at WHO’s weekly press conference, the last one for 2022, noting that the organization “continues to ask China to conduct requested studies”.
Ghebreyesus stressed that all hypotheses about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “remain on the table”.
WHO experts who traveled to China last year, where the coronavirus was first discovered in 2019, admitted four hypotheses for the origin of SARS-CoV-2: transmission from an animal to humans via an intermediate animal (hypothesis most likely), direct transmission via a single species, contamination in the food chain or laboratory accident.
Covid-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, which was discovered in China at the end of 2019 and has spread rapidly around the world.
The disease has been an international public health emergency since January 30, 2020, and a pandemic since March 11, 2020.
SARS-CoV-2 has taken on several variants and subvariants, some more contagious than others.
The pandemic has already caused more than 6.6 million deaths and more than 650 million infections worldwide, according to the Covid-19 Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University. In total, more than 13.1 billion doses of vaccines have been administered to date.
Source: DN
