WHO stresses the need to find the source of coronavirus




Pinning down the source of the coronavirus pandemic should help in working out how Covid-19 has “invaded the human species” so quickly, a senior WHO official told AFP.
The outbreak has triggered a fierce diplomatic spat between China and the United States – with the World Health Organization at the center of the row.
In late March, US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping struck an informal truce in the war of words over the origin of the deadly disease.
But it quickly broke down. Trump has been accusing Beijing of being slow to alert the world to the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and openly suspects China of covering up an accident at the eastern city’s virology lab.
Far from the cross-Pacific spat, Sylvie Briand, the WHO’s director of infectious hazard management, said it was crucial to know the origin of the virus “to understand how it has evolved”.
“It is a virus of animal origin transmitted to humans. And so we have to try to understand how the adaptation of this virus allowed it to invade the human species,” she told AFP outside the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.