China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, one of the team’s investigators said. This is complicating the research and efforts to understand how the outbreak began.
The team had requested raw patient data on the 174 cases of COVID-19 that China had identified. These were to be taken mainly from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.
Chinese officials and scientists provided their own extensive summaries and analysis of data on the cases, said the WHO team members. But the WHO team wasn’t allowed to view the raw underlying data on those retrospective studies, which could allow them to conduct their own analysis on how early and how extensively the virus began to spread in China.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood center in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.
The WHO team, which arrived in China in January and spent four weeks looking into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, was limited to visits organized by their Chinese hosts and prevented from contact with community members, due to health restrictions.
