According to a Reuters report, a WHO covid origin investigation team member has gone on record stating that China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to a World Health Organization team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.
No Data Only Summary Report
The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team.
Why is raw data important?
Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymized but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses, and how their responses were analyzed.
“That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.
He said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood center in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.
“That’s why we’ve persisted to ask for that,” Dwyer said. “Why that doesn’t happen, I couldn’t comment. Whether it’s political or time or it’s difficult … But whether there are any other reasons why the data isn’t available, I don’t know. One would only speculate.”
Much More Data Received
While the Chinese authorities provided a lot of material, he said the issue of access to the raw patient data would be mentioned in the team’s final report. “The WHO people certainly felt that they had received much much more data than they had ever received in the previous year. So that in itself is an advance.”
Report Summary To Be Released Soon
A summary of the team’s findings could be released as early as next week, the WHO said on Friday.
The probe had been plagued by delay, concern over access and bickering between Beijing and Washington, which accused China of hiding the extent of the initial outbreak and criticized the terms of the visit, under which Chinese experts conducted the first phase of research.
The team, which arrived in China in January and spent four weeks looking into the origins of the outbreak, was limited to visits organized by their Chinese hosts and prevented from contact with community members, due to health restrictions. The first two weeks were spent in hotel quarantine.
China’s refusal to hand over raw data on the early COVID-19 cases was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on Friday.
Coordination With WHO Team Harmonious
Dwyer said the work within the WHO team was harmonious but that there were “arguments” at times with their Chinese counterparts over the interpretation and significance of the data, which he described as “natural” in such probes.
Peter Daszak, a zoologist and another member of the WHO mission, however, tweeted on Saturday here that he had a different experience as the lead of the mission’s animal and environment working group.
This was NOT my experience on @WHO mission. As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust & openness w/ my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways. https://t.co/gwGnm9pnGj
— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) February 13, 2021
“I found trust & openness w/ my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways,” he said in response to the New York Times piece.
Beijing has sought to cast doubt on the notion that the coronavirus originated in China, pointing to imported frozen food as a conduit.
Cold Chain Investigation
“We might be having a talk about the cold chain and they might be more firm about what the data shows than what we might have been, but that’s natural. Whether there’s political pressure to have different opinions, I don’t know. There may well be, but it’s hard to know.”
Cold chain refers to the transport and trade of frozen food.
On Tuesday, Peter Ben Embarek, who led the WHO delegation, told a news conference that transmission of the virus via frozen food is a possibility, but pointed to market vendors selling frozen animal products including farmed wild animals as a potential pathway that warrants further study.
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Source: Reuters
