WUHAN — The head of a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of the new coronavirus said bats remain a likely source and that transmission of the virus via frozen food is a possibility that warrants further investigation, but he ruled out a lab leak.
Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team of independent experts in its nearly monthlong visit to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged at a seafood market in late 2019, said the team’s work had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed their picture of the outbreak.
“The possible path from whatever original animal species all the way through to the Huanan market could have taken a very long and convoluted path involving also movements across borders,” Embarek told a nearly three-hour media briefing on Tuesday. (See related story in World, Page B3.)
Embarek said work to identify the coronavirus’ origins points to a natural reservoir in bats, but it is unlikely that they were in Wuhan.
Investigators were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought, he said.
“In trying to understand the picture of December 2019 we embarked on a very detailed and profound search for other cases that may have been missed, cases earlier on in 2019,” he said. “And the conclusion was we did not find evidence of large outbreaks that could be related to cases of COVID-19 prior to December 2019 in Wuhan or elsewhere.”
The possibility the virus leaked from a lab — which has been the subject of conspiracy theories—was extremely unlikely and did not require further study, Embarek said.
Liang Wannian, head of China’s expert panel on the outbreak, said there was evidence of coronavirus infections that could have preceded the first detected case by “several weeks.”