Chief Epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Zeng Guang, has said the investigation into the origin of COVID-19 should be shifted to the US after a study has revealed the disease could have been circulating there before December 2019.
During an interview with the state-owned tabloid, Global Times, the CDC Chief noted that earlier this week, the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) published a study which claimed that at least seven people in five different US states were infected with SARS-COV-2, the Coronavirus which causes COVID-19, weeks before the first official cases were reported in December 2019.
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The world must shift its attention towards the US to determine the origin of the Coronavirus. The US is home to many leading biological laboratories that should now be investigated as well.
While commenting on the study, the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, said that it has become obvious that there were multiple origins of the Coronavirus outbreak, adding that other countries must cooperate with the World Health Organization (WHO) to find the origin of COVID-19.
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The origin of COVID-19 has been a source of a political rift between the US and China, with the former alleging that the Coronavirus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the city where the outbreak was first identified in December 2019.
A previous study had claimed that SARS-COV-2 could have been circulating in Europe as early as September. However, experts argued that this doesn’t rule out the possibility that COVID-19 did not originate from China, where many SARS-like Coronaviruses have already been found in the wild.
