No indication of Covid-19 virus in Wuhan before Dec 2019, says WHO mission over origin of novel coronavirus

'There is no indication of transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 in the population of the period before Dec 2019,' said Liang Wannian, head of China team

Peter Ben Embarek and Marion Koopmans, members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), attend the WHO-China joint study news conference at a hotel in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 9, 2021. Credit: Reuters

There is insufficient evidence to determine that Covid-19 was being spread in China's central Wuhan before December 2019, a joint WHO and Chinese expert mission into the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan said Tuesday.

"There is no indication of the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 in the population of the period before Dec 2019," said Liang Wannian, head of the China team, at a press conference, adding that there was "not enough evidence" to determine if the virus had spread in the city prior to that.

Read: WHO finds evidence of wider circulation of coronavirus outside Wuhan market in December 2019

WHO foreign expert Ben Embarak, who was based in the WHO's Beijing office for two years from 2009, backed up the assertion saying there was no evidence of "large outbreaks in Wuhan" before then.

The mission is a diplomatically knotty one, which was trailed before it began by fears of a whitewash, with the US demanding a "robust" probe and China firing back with a warning not to "politicise" the investigation.

During the closely-monitored visit, reporters were largely kept at arms' length from the experts, but snippets of their findings crept out over Twitter and interviews.

The experts spent one month in China, two weeks in quarantine and the same again on fieldwork.