The United States and the World Health Organization pressured China on Saturday to provide more data, as the WHO investigation in Wuhan into the beginnings of the pandemic ended without final conclusions.
• Read also: All the developments of the pandemic
“We want more data. We have asked for more data, ”said in an interview with AFP Peter Ben Embarek, who went with his team for a month to Wuhan, where the coronavirus responsible for the epidemic was discovered in December 2019.
“There is a set of frustrations, but also realistic expectations as to what is doable in a given timeframe,” he added, before hoping that the data requested would be provided, allowing more far.
“Strong concerns”
For its part, the White House has let it be known that it has “strong concerns” about the first results of the WHO investigation into the origins of the coronavirus in China and also asked Beijing to provide more information. .
“We have strong concerns about how the first results of the Covid-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the procedure used to achieve it,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in this statement. .
“To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make its data on the first days of the epidemic accessible,” he added.
Dispatched to China, WHO experts appeared to rule out the possibility that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the Trump administration claimed, at a press conference on Monday. in this city of Hubei, at the end of their mission. They had considered that this was a “highly improbable” hypothesis.
But the boss of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, subsequently seemed to correct the situation by saying Friday that “all the hypotheses (remained) on the table” to explain the origin of the pandemic.
Under Donald Trump’s administration, the United States had left the WHO. The former Republican president accused the organization of being too conciliatory with China.
Extended suspension of flights
As soon as he took office on January 20, his Democratic successor Joe Biden announced Washington’s return to the WHO.
“Reclaiming our place in the WHO also means demanding the highest standards. And at this critical moment, protecting the credibility of the WHO is paramount, ”said Jake Sullivan.
WHO experts believe COVID-19 originated in bats and may have been transmitted to humans via another mammal.
However, they do not know where and when the pandemic really started, even if no major outbreak was reported in Wuhan or elsewhere before December 2019.
The pandemic has killed more than 2.38 million people worldwide since the end of December 2019, according to a report established on Saturday by AFP from official sources.
After the United States (480,902 dead), the most bereaved countries are Brazil (237,489), Mexico (172,557), India (155,550) and the United Kingdom (116,287).
For the past month, the contaminations trend has been dropping sharply in Europe. If the curve of the average daily deaths also sags, the dynamic remains rather constant when placed in a longer time frame.
Portugal nevertheless announced on Saturday that it would extend the suspension of flights with Brazil and the United Kingdom until March 1 to control the explosion of COVID-19 cases and the spread of new variants of the virus.
In France, the department of Moselle (east) is severely affected by the epidemic, with a progression of the South African variant, but schools remain open and there is no local containment, the measures appearing “to date sufficient ”, according to the authorities.
In Latin America, Peru, facing its second wave of Covid-19, recorded its record for hospitalizations linked to the coronavirus, with 14,333 hospitalized patients, according to the Ministry of Health.
“Dream come true”
In the Middle East, Lebanon received the first doses of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 on Saturday, on the eve of the start of vaccinations in the country in crisis where the hospital sector is under strain.
“This dream has come true thanks to the support of our international partners”, he congratulated the Minister of Health, Hamad Hassan, at the Beirut airport for the reception of the 28,500 doses arriving from Belgium.
In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani warned on Saturday against a “fourth wave” of Covid-19 in Iran, after an increase in the number of cases in some regions.
After several weeks of low levels of contamination, some towns in Khuzestan province, in the south-west of the country, are now “red” zones, he warned.
Iran is the country in the Middle East hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic with nearly 59,000 deaths out of more than 1.5 million people infected.