The controversy over the World Health Organisation team being barred from gaining access to regions in China it had wanted to visit in connection with the pandemic probe, has acquired a new dimension with the revelation on Monday that signs of the outbreak were much wider in Wuhan in December 2018 than previously thought. In terms of periodisation of the medical narrative, will the tag Covid-19 now be recast to Covid-18?

The investigators of the UN entity, who represent the comity of nations, are urgently seeking access to thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine. According to the chief investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, the team had found several signs of the “ more wide-ranging 2019 spread”, establishing for the first time there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December.

On the first anniversary, so to speak, of coronavirus, WHO has set the record straight; the “breaking news” is decidedly more critical than whether WHO is facing restrictions in the course of its survey into the why and wherefore of Covid. The team, which arrived in China in January and spent four weeks looking into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, also met the first patient, an office employee in his 40s with no major travel history.

He was reportedly infected on December 8. The slow emergence of WHO’s data may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease, specifically that it may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.

This can be contextualised with Embarek’s statement in Switzerland on his return from Wuhan ~ “The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, and this is a new finding.”

Indeed, WHO’s findings predate the conventional theories on the origins of Covid. Mr Embarek has let it be known that the head of the WHO mission in Wuhan had stated four hypotheses on how the virus spread, but reiterated that the “laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population.” Nor for that matter has it been possible to identify any animal species as a “potential reservoir for this disease”.

The fineprint of WHO’s assessment must be that coronavirus is the fallout of a human-to-human affliction. Over the weekend, the United States has expressed concern over the possibility of the Chinese government’s interference in the WHO’s recent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in Wuhan.

It is fervently to be hoped that the investigation will be free from intervention and alteration by the People’s Republic of China; certainly WHO must be aware it did its reputation considerable harm with its initial responses that seemed to have been scripted by Beijing.