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 China has dismissed criticism of its early handling of the
coronavirus, first identified in the city of Wuhan at the end of
2019, and foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday
that the country would welcome the WHO team.
But amid simmering geopolitical tensions, experts said the
investigators were unlikely to be allowed to scrutinise some of the
more sensitive aspects of the outbreak, with Beijing desperate to
avoid blame for a virus that has killed more than 1.8 million people
worldwide.
"Even before this investigation, top officials from both sides have
been very polarised in their opinions on the origins of the
outbreak," said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow with the Council on
Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank.
"They will have to be politically savvy and draw conclusions that
are acceptable to all the major parties," he added.
While other countries continue to struggle with infection surges,
China has aggressively doused flare-ups. After a new cluster of
cases last week, the city of Shenyang sealed off entire communities
and required all non-essential workers to stay home.
On Saturday, senior diplomat Wang Yi praised the anti-pandemic
efforts, saying China not only curbed domestic infections, but also
"took the lead in building a global anti-epidemic defence" by
providing aid to more than 150 countries.
But mindful of the criticism China has faced worldwide, Wang also
became the highest-ranking official to question the consensus about
COVID-19's origins, saying "more and more studies" show that it
emerged in multiple regions.
China is also the only country to claim COVID-19 can be transmitted
via cold chain imports, with the country blaming new outbreaks in
Beijing and Dalian on contaminated shipments - even though the WHO
has downplayed those risks.
TRANSPARENCY
China has been accused of a cover-up that delayed its initial
response, allowing the virus to spread further.
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 The topic remains sensitive,
with only a handful of studies into the origins
of COVID-19 made available to the public.
But there have also been signs China is willing
to share information that contradicts the
official picture. Last week, a
study by China's Center for Disease Control showed that blood
samples from 4.43% of Wuhan's population contained COVID-19
antibodies, indicating that the city's infection rates were far
higher than originally acknowledged.
But scientists said China must also share any findings suggesting
COVID-19 was circulating domestically long before it was officially
identified in December 2019.
An Italian study showed that COVID-19 might have been in Europe
several months before China's first official case. Chinese state
media used the paper to support theories that COVID-19 originated
overseas and entered China via contaminated frozen food or foreign
athletes competing at the World Military Games in Wuhan in October
2019.
Raina MacIntyre, head of the Kirby Institute's Biosecurity Research
Program in Australia, said the investigation needed to draw "a
comprehensive global picture of the epidemiological clues",
including any evidence COVID-19 was present outside of China before
December 2019.
However, political issues mean they are unlikely to be given much
leeway to investigate one hypothesis, that the outbreak was caused
by a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said MacIntyre.
"I think it is unlikely all viruses in the lab at the time will be
made available to the team," she said. "So I do not think we will
ever know the truth."
(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Martin Pollard
in Wuhan. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
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