- Covid origin probe should now shift to US, says Chinese expert.
- A NIH study showed that at least seven people in five different U.S. states were infected with SARS-CoV-2.
- The origin of the pandemic has become a source of political tension between China and the United States.
A senior Chinese epidemiologist has demanded that the second phase of investigation into the origins of coronavirus should be conducted in the United States, reports Reuters.
In his statement, he referred to a study which described that the virus could have been circulating there as early as December 2019.
Slow testing in the US
Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly told Global Times that the US was slow to test people for Covid-19 at an early stage of the pandemic and it possesses many biological laboratories all around the world.
“All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny,” Global Times quoted Zeng as saying.
The blame game
China’s attempt to put blame on the United States for the devastating pandemic comes after the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) published a study that showed at least seven people in five states were infected with Sars-CoV-2 weeks before the country reported its first official cases.
The researchers analysed more than 24,000 stored blood samples collected from across 50 US states between January 2 and March 18, 2020, through the NIH’s ‘All of Us Research Program’.
Key entry points identified
As per the new findings of the study, researchers detected antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 in the samples of nine participants, all of them from outside the major urban hotspots of Seattle and New York City, believed to be key points of entry of the virus in the US.
The study suggests that the positive samples came as early as January 7 from participants in Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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Source: Reuters
