To Solve a Morbid Mystery

"We know it's very, very similar to the virus in the bat, but did it go through an intermediate species?"
"This is a question we all need answered."
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris

"Two WHO experts are currently en route to China to meet with fellow scientists and learn about the progress made in understanding the animal reservoir for COVID-19 and how the disease jumped between animals and humans."
"This will help lay the groundwork for the WHO-led international mission into the origins."
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

"Science must stay open to all possibilities [regarding the pandemic’s origins]."
"We need to lay out a series of investigations that will get the answers that I’m sure the Chinese government, governments around the world, and ourselves really need in order to manage the risk going forward into the future."
Mike Ryan, executive director, WHO's Health Emergencies Program

In this July 8, 2020, file photo, Stephane Labossiere, right, with the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, hands out masks and printed information about free COVID-19 testing in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

Scientists around the world are working feverishly, wracking their brains, engaging in research, involved in experimental trials, all in an effort under huge pressure, to discover a safe and effective vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, a respiratory disease that behaves like no other before it, sparing the majority of people it infects, and wreaking utterly morbid destruction in a minority of others. But this is a substantial minority, well over a half-million people have so far died from the dire effects of the novel coronavirus.

Few such zoonitics have proven to be so successfully opportunistic as this one. Spreading with lightning speed across an unready world. It was always known, and scientists warned governments that the global community was 'due' for a major pandemic. No one might have imagined the vast sweep and level of destruction such a global pandemic would be capable of causing, even with the historical record of the Black Plague that destroyed so many lives that Europe lost 25 million people.

Close to 13 million people worldwide have contracted COVID-19. This, in a technologically advanced world, with modern hospitals, well-trained health professionals, laboratories the world over using sophisticated research techniques, medical equipment relying on the latest in technical advances to aid in the desperate effort to save lives, stem the tide of infections, bring the virus under control.

But it is also an interconnected world, of travel and communications, trade and commerce of great assistance to the replicating and mutating disease seeking new homes in human bodies.

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory researches some of the world's most dangerous pathogens.  Photo: Wuhan Institute of Virology 

Science wants to know where the virus originated, when and how it transmitted from animals to humans to become a deadly zoonotic. It was initially held to have been transmitted to shoppers at an open-air market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were sold as well as fruits and vegetables and fish. But then, outbreaks were seen elsewhere in Wuhan, not from the market. The mystery compounded by the presence of two pathology research laboratories located in Wuhan, one quite close to the Wuhan market.

A theory was born that the virus was one produced in the laboratory, and that it had 'escaped'. Since then, tests on sewage in Italy and in Spain have detected traces of the virus that pre-date the first known emergence of the virus in China. None of the claims have been validated. But there are more than enough questions surrounding the mystery of where, how and when, that a scientific enquiry will be hard put to answer.

But the answers would provide some much-needed insights in the world of medical science to aid in combating this global pandemic, and to make preparations for those to follow.

The two WHO experts who are specialists in animal health and epidemiology are set to work in tandem with their Chinese counterparts. hoping to determine the scope and itinerary of the investigation. Among other questions to be probed, did the virus transfer through an intermediate species. As to its origins, as a chimera of a virus that the Wuhan laboratory worked on, then lost -- months before the outbreak was reported, U.S. diplomats visited the laboratory and were struck by its lax security, reporting back to Washington that they felt concerned.

All of which may, or may not be merely coincidental. The laboratory had discovered a SARS-like virus in bat caves in an isolated location and had been working on the virus for several years before the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In time, perfectly reasonable explanations in science may be discovered to clear up any mysteries relating to origin and transmission. In the meanwhile, there is an aura of distrust in t he scientific and political community worldwide, with accusations that China was less than forthcoming with its data.

Add to that the perception that the World Health Organization was less than objective in its relationship with China, and with the kind of information it was itself making available to governments worldwide in preparation for the spread of a highly infectious disease gaining a formidable reputation as a world-wide threat, and the impression is that whenever a report does
circulate that summarizes the analyses undertaken by the UN team, it may be viewed with skeptical caution.

Medical staff transfer a patient at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong, China. Photo Reuters

"We view the scientific investigation as a necessary step to having a complete and transparent understanding of how this virus has spread throughout the world."
"We expect that the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] will offer the team of scientists full access to data, samples, and localities, and look forward to its timely report."
Andrew Bremberg, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Geneva