lørdag 30. januar 2021

WHO team visits 2nd Wuhan hospital in virus investigation

Members of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited another Wuhan hospital that had treated early COVID-19 patients on their second full day of work on Saturday. Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was one of the city’s first to deal with patients in early 2020 suffering from a then-unknown virus and is a key part of the epidemiological history of the disease.

“Just back from visit at Jinyintan hospital, that specialised in infectious diseases and was designated for treatment of the first cases in Wuhan,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said in a post on Twitter. “Stories quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.”

Zoologist Peter Daszak of the U.S. group EcoHealth Alliance, who is a member of the team, said in a tweet that the visit was an “important opportunity to talk directly” with medics who were fighting the virus at the critical time. The team’s first face-to-face meetings with Chinese scientists took place on Friday, before the experts who specialize in animal health, virology, food safety and epidemiology visited another early site of the outbreak, the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.