Thread by @WilliamYang120

After he refuted media reports about #China refusing to provide key data about the earliest #COVID19 cases in #Wuhan, @PeterDaszak did an interview with @nytimes, revealing more details about the @WHO experts' trips to Wuhan. nytimes.com/2021/02/14/hea…

"The city went on lockdown, I think, 76 days. They were locked in their apartments — people died, and they didn’t know about it. And from then on, they’ve been accused of starting a pandemic, and it’s been called the Wuhan virus, the China virus,...

... and there was just a sense of outrage and sadness."

"No. You’ve got a task to do. You’ve volunteered. You know what it’s going to be like. You get caught up in the historical importance. I don’t know if we were the first foreigners to walk around the Huanan seafood market, which is blocked off even to Chinese citizens."

"These people have been through harrowing conditions, and they’re now lauded as heroes in China, and then the rest of the world now is fighting that war. And China, of course, is absolutely petrified of this virus catching hold again."

"From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases?

How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there? When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they’ve done the analysis, and we’ve got new information. It was extremely useful."

"At the time, you couldn’t really say much. We were trying to not undermine the process by revealing anything while we were on the trip.

The market closed on the 31st of December or the 1st of January, and China C.D.C. sent a team in of scientists to try and find out what was going on."

"We knew early on that there were 500 samples collected, and there were many positives, and in that sampling were some animal carcasses, or meat. But there was not really much information publicly about what had been done. So we got all that information.

And that, to me, was a real eye-opener. They’d actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They’d been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They’d caught animals around the market."

"They’d caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They’d sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses. A farm with rabbits could have been really critical.

There was talk about badgers, and in China, when they say badger, that means ferret badger. Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that’s clue No. 1."

"There were 10 stalls that sold wildlife. There were vendors from South China, including Yunnan Province, Guangxi Province and Guangdong Province. Yunnan Province is where the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats.

Guangxi and Guangdong are where the pangolins were captured. They had close viruses. You’ve got animals coming in to the market which are susceptible. Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there’s the real red flag."

"Now the Chinese group did swab those animals, and they were all negative, but it’s just one small group of animals in the freezer that were left behind. We don’t know what else was for sale there. So these two clues are really important.

When we got to actually visit the market, to me it was quite striking. The pictures you see of that market closed now are of quite orderly buildings with shutters, and you think, This a very efficient, typical city market."

"It doesn’t really look like a live animal market. Once you get there on the ground, it’s different. It’s pretty ramshackle. It looks like a place that would sell live animals. There’s plenty of evidence of live aquatic animals, the turtle tanks, the fish tanks, the snakes, ...

... which we know were available. What we now have are a clear link and a potential pathway."

"There was other spread going on outside of Huanan market. There are other patients who have no links to the market, quite a few in December. There were other markets.

And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work."

"When we sat down as a group, the China team and the W.H.O. team on the last full day of work, and said, “Let’s go through the hypotheses,” the one that received the most enthusiastic support was this pathway — wildlife, through a domesticated wildlife link, into Wuhan."

"For the animals chain, it’s straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You’ve got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You’ve got to test them."

"You’ve got to test the community. You’ve got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they’ve got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement. If the virus is in those southern border states,...

... it’s possible that there’s been some movement across neighboring countries like Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar. We’re finding more and more related viruses now. There’s one in Japan and one in Cambodia, one in Thailand."

"For the human side, look for earlier cases, for clusters; look in blood banks for serum, if possible. Anything like this is going to be sensitive in China, and it’s going to take some persuasion and diplomacy and energy for them to do that because,...

... to be honest, looking for the source of this virus within China is not a great, high priority I think for the Chinese government."