The lab leak hypothesis is an extremely unlikely pathway for Covid-19 and will not require further study as part of their work in studying the origins of the virus, WHO official says

The head of the World Health Organization-led team looking into the origins of Covid-19 said on Tuesday that its investigation had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed the picture of the outbreak.

Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO virus expert, also told a press briefing that work to identify the origins of the coronavirus points to a natural reservoir in bats, but it is unlikely that they were in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the outbreak was discovered in late 2019.

Coronavirus could have been circulating elsewhere before Wuhan discovery.

The virus that causes Covid-19 could have been circulating in other regions before it was identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, a top expert at China’s health authority said on Tuesday.

Prof Liang Wannian, an expert with China’s Health Commission, also told a press briefing at the end of a nearly one-month visit to Wuhan by a WHO-led team that there had been no substantial spread of the virus in the city before the late 2019 outbreak.

Animal hosts that carried coronavirus still unidentified.

Prof Liang says discovery of virus suggests Sars-Cov-2 may have originated from zoonotic transmission but an animal host remains to be identified.

Bats and pangolins are potential candidates for transmission but coronavirus samples found in those species are not identical to Sars-Cov-2, he adds.