WHO explains how bats spreaded COVID-19 to humans

According to WHO representatives and Chinese experts, the virus was apparently transmitted from bats to humans through other animals.

"Experts believe that a virus leak from the laboratory is unlikely", - Kommersant reports, citing a draft WHO report.

Due to the unlikely scenario of a virus leak from the laboratory, WHO recommends focusing on the study of versions not associated with this version.

Experts from different countries, including Russia, USA, UK, Germany and Japan, have been investigating the causes of the coronavirus pandemic for several months. In January, a WHO expert panel arrived in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 outbreak was first recorded.

While working in Wuhan, experts worked out several versions of the origin of the virus. As noted by AP, now the report on the work of the commission is actually ready. Media representatives have already reviewed its draft. The final text is being prepared for release in the coming days. AR clarifies that the publication of the report has been repeatedly postponed. The delay in releasing the data raised questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to distort the results.

As Vasily Vlasov, Doctor of Medicine, professor at the Higher School of Economics, told Sputnik radio, Russian colleagues have questions about the conclusions of foreign experts, since the source of all information was not field research, but data from the Chinese side.

“Unfortunately, the actions of the WHO were very dubious. This conclusion, which follows from the work of the commission, is not trustworthy at all. The fact is that the commission was actually formed by the Chinese. Members of the commission partly had a conflict of interest in relation to this issue. They did not have the opportunity to conduct field research and were entirely based only on the results and data provided by the Chinese”, - explained Vasily Vlasov.

In his opinion, a new commission independent from China could solve the problem of trust and finally establish the source of the coronavirus infection. All of the WHO studies in January were supervised by the Chinese authorities.

According to Johns Hopkins University, since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 127 million people have fallen ill with the coronavirus, more than 2.7 million have died. The largest number of infections and deaths was recorded in the United States. In Russia, which is the fifth in the world in terms of the incidence of COVID-19, over 4.5 million people have been infected with the coronavirus. Almost 98 thousand patients have died.