While saying that “accidents do happen,” a team of international experts, including those from the World Health Organisation (WHO), investigating the origins of COVID19 said on Tuesday that laboratory leak of the virus is “extremely unlikely.”
Addressing a press conference at the end of the joint WHO-China study, more than a year after the initial cases of COVID19 were reported from Wuhan in China’s western Hubei province, Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the WHO mission, said more work was required to identify the source of the virus.
Liang Wannian, a member of the WHO-China joint study team, said that there is no evidence of transmission of the novel coronavirus before December 2019 in Wuhan.The experts did not even deny the possibility that novel coronavirus cases could have been prevalent in other regions even before the early cases were detected in Wuhan.