WHO experts rule out laboratory accident in Wuhan

World Health Organization (WHO) experts spent four weeks in the central Chinese city of Wuhan to search for the origin of the coronavirus pathogen. They consider a laboratory accident “extremely unlikely”, as the head of the team, Peter Ben Embarek, explained yesterday at a press conference. The thesis that the virus originated in a laboratory is no longer being pursued. Whether the virus could have been spread via frozen products, however, still had to be examined in more detail. The investigations in China had not dramatically changed the experts’ picture of the pandemic outbreak, Embarek explained. But there is now a better understanding of the beginnings.