'Shift Focus To US': Chinese Expert On Probe Over Covid-19 Origin

While commenting on the study foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday, said it was now "obvious" that the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins".

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New Delhi: After a study showed that the virus could be circulating in the U.S. in December 2019, a senior Chinese expert has said that the next phase of investigation on the origin of Covid-19 should be done in the United States. 

A study was published by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH) which said that at least 7 people were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 weeks before the first official cases were reported.

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention while speaking to state-owned Global Times said that it's time to shift the attention to the United States which was slow to test people when the outbreak first happened and it was the home for many biological laboratories. 

While commenting on the study foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday, said it was now "obvious" that the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins" and that other countries should cooperate with WHO according to a Reuters report.

The origin of Covid-19 has become a matter of political tension with much of the focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak was first identified in late 2019. An article was published in the Wall Street Journal which revealed that three researchers at Wuhan Institute fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized. The report was based on previously undisclosed US intelligence. The researchers were admitted into the hospital a month before China reported the first case of Covid-19.

The US' top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci also said he is "not convinced" Covid-19 developed naturally. US President Joe Biden, has also ordered the intelligence community to re-double efforts to examine how the virus originated, including the lab accident theory.