Global health officials said that the virus which causes Covid-19 is “extremely unlikely” to have entered the human population as a result of a laboratory-related incident.
“The findings suggest lab incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” Dr Peter Ben Embarek, leader of the World Health Organisation team investigating the origins of the virus in Wuhan.
The team has made a series of recommendations for future studies to examine the origins of the virus.
The Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, “may have originated from zoonotic transmission”, a team of experts from China and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have concluded.
But the “reservoir hosts” remain to be identified, experts told a press conference.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence that the virus was present in Wuhan before December 2019, they said.
WHO experts have been probing the origins of the virus in the Chinese city and have spent four weeks there.
Dr Peter Ben Embarek, leader of the WHO investigation team, said: “We did not find evidence of large outbreaks prior to December 2019 in Wuhan or elsewhere.”
