ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister for Overseas Pakistanis Zulfi Bukhari announced Friday that Pakistan would sent its first flight on May 18, 2020 to repatriate students from Wuhan,...

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A wholesale market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan played a role in the outbreak of the novel coronavirus last year, as the source or possibly as an “amplifying setting”, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, calling for more research.

Chinese authorities shut down the market in January as part of efforts to stop the spread of the virus and ordered a temporary ban on trade and consumption of wildlife.

“The market played a role in the event, that’s clear. But what role we don’t know; whether it was the source or amplifying setting or just a coincidence that some cases were detected in and around that market,” said Dr Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and zoonotic viruses that cross the species barrier from animals to humans.

It was not clear whether live animals or infected vendors or shoppers may have brought the virus into the market, he told a Geneva news briefing.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said there is “a significant amount of evidence” the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory, although he has also said there wasn’t certainty.

Read: The Wuhan lab at the core of a virus controversy

No public evidence has linked the outbreak to the lab in Wuhan and scientists have said the coronavirus appears to have developed in nature. A German intelligence report cast doubts on Pompeo’s allegations, Der Spiegel reported.

Ben Embarek did not address the accusations. He noted that it took researchers a year to identify camels as the source of the Mers (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) virus, a coronavirus that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and spread in the Middle East, adding: “It’s not too late.”

“What is important, what would be of great help, is to get hold of the virus before it adapted to humans, before the version we have now. Because then we would better understand how it adapted to humans, how it evolved,” he said.

“In terms of investigations, China has most probably, most likely, all the expertise needed to do these investigations. They have lot of very qualified researchers to that,” he said.

A common sight across Asia, wet markets traditionally sell fresh produce and live animals, such as fish, in the open air.

Many markets worldwide that sell live animals must be better regulated and hygiene conditions improved, and some should be closed down, Ben Embarek said. “But the vast majority can be fixed, can be better organised.”

It is often a question of controlling waste management, the movement of people and goods, and of separating live animals from animal products and from fresh goods, he said.

The government of Pakistan has decided to bring back via special flights its students stuck in Wuhan, China, ground zero of the novel coronavirus.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Overseas Pakistanis Zulfiqar Bukhari tweeted the development on Friday night, referring to those stranded there as "the bravest soldiers".

Pakistan International Airline (PIA) has been tasked to bring the first batch of Pakistanis – mostly students – beginning May 18, when around 250 individuals are expected to return.

Pakistanis who had been studying in Wuhan and other cities in the Chinese province of Hubei – first region in the world to be put under a strict lockdown on Jan 20 after being declared a virus epicenter – had appealed at the time to be evacuated.

Multiple requests for evacuation were made not only by the stranded students but also by their families back home. However, the government said it would not repatriate them immediately and would follow guidelines and processes put in place by China in this regard.

To allay the fears of the students and their families, the Foreign Office in February sent two of its officials from the Beijing embassy to Wuhan while the strict lockdown was still in place. The FO said the staffers were to remain in Wuhan till the lockdown ended and would meet students in different universities to get an update on their well-being and safety.

In March, President Arif Alvi and Minister for Foreign Affairs Shah Mahmood Qureshi visited China and interacted with Pakistani citizens there via video link.

Upon returning from the trip, both the foreign minister and President Alvi briefed the media and said that the students were in a good condition and had only requested that Pakistani food be provided to them.

On March 28, China began lifting the lockdown in Wuhan. By April 8, the restrictions were completely lifted and some of the the students celebrated by cooking themselves a meal.

Background

We aimed to investigate the epidemiological and clinical features, and medical care-seeking process of patients with the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, to provide useful information to contain COVID-19 in other places with similar outbreaks of the virus.

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There are "questions to be asked" about where coronavirus came from, Boris Johnson's spokesperson has said.

The first cohort of children are returning to school in Wuhan, China, where the first case of the new coronavirus was reported late last year.

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted many industries, both legal and illicit. Production of fentanyl, which relies on chemical ingredients sourced mainly from Wuhan, China, has been particularly hard hit.

Despite President Trump's statements that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory in Wuhan, scientist say the evidence points to a natural origin.

U.S. and U.K. intel agencies are reviewing the private report, but intel analysts examined and couldn't confirm a similar theory previously.

It was not clear whether live animals or infected vendors or shoppers may have brought the virus into the market.

After 76 days under lockdown, China's Wuhan city is gradually returning to a new normal. But while Covid-19 infection rates have fallen, social distancing measures are still in place and the economic repercussions for the industrial hub are also becoming clear.

Despite President Trump's statements that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory in Wuhan, scientist say the evidence points to a natural origin.

U.S. and U.K. intel agencies are reviewing the private report, but intel analysts examined and couldn't confirm a similar theory previously.

Beijing: The authorities of the Chinese city of Wuhan - the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic - have recalculated statistics of the coronavirus disease, increasing the number of confirmed cases by 325 to 50,333 and the death toll by 1,290 to 3,869.

"The number of confirmed cases has risen by 325 to 50,333, the number of victims has increased by 1,290 to 3,869," the authorities said via the Weibo social network.

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11. To date, more than 2.1 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 144,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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US President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened new tariffs against Beijing as he claimed to have seen evidence linking the novel Coronavirus to a lab in China's ground-zero city of Wuhan. Trump's comments undercut a rare public statement from his own intelligence community on Thursday which stated no such assessment has been made by them whether the COVID-19 outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.

'I have evidence'

At his daily White House briefing on COVID-19 on Thursday, Trump was asked by a reporter: "Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?" "Yes, I have. Yes, I have," Trump said. He, however, refused to provide any details, except for saying that investigations are on and it would be out soon.

Asked what gave him a high degree of confidence that the virus originated from the WIV, he said, "I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that."

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Thursday it concurs with the "wide scientific consensus" regarding COVID-19's natural origins. The US has 1,069,400 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

WHO blamed for pandemic

Trump also blamed the World Health Organisation for the pandemic. "I think the WHO should be ashamed of themselves because they're like the public relations agency for China," he said. Trump, however, did not hold his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping responsible for the global outbreak.

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Health officials are investigating if a person has caught the deadly new coronavirus in New South Wales.

There are 117 nationals from Wuhan in Bangkok, Thailand, and a further 100 in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, who are understood to be desperate to get back to the coronavirus-stricken city 'as soon as possible'.

Kevin Rudd has slammed Peter Dutton's decision to send Wuhan evacuees to Christmas Island, suggesting the home affairs minister would have treated them differently if they were 'white.'  

Lyubov Ahuja has spent the past year-and-a-half in Wuhan studying a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery at the Tongji Medical College.

Chinese city Suifenhe on the border with Russia has gone into full lockdown after detecting a total of 127 imported coronavirus cases. A makeshift hospital is being built and will be ready on Saturday.

The video shows the Langowan Market, which is a traditional market in Indonesia's North Sulawesi province selling wild animals for consumption.

The evacuees were greeted by a crew in yellow hazmat suits when they disembarked from their Batik Air Indonesia flight at Hang Nadim International Airport in Batam on Sunday.

President Donald Trump made the explosive charge that the coronavirus that has caused millions of infections may have been created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan and spoke of ways to punish the nation.

The Wuhan National Laboratory opened in January 2018, with the highest safety rating and plans to study SARS and Ebola. A Nature article warned that some were concerned over its safety.

During the past month, Wuhan's Institute of Virology has removed photographs of scientists working in its laboratories and edited out references to visits by US diplomats.

Maatje Benassi and her husband Matt described the 'nightmare' of their ordeal to CNN, saying their lives have been turned upside down since the theory began spreading on social media.

Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said the pathogen in the report was different from the strain of coronavirus that has triggered the pandemic.

The Suparna privately chartered flight touched down at Sydney Airport on April 8 with 70 tonnes of personal protective equipment from Wuhan, the reported epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Mi Feng, a spokesperson from China's National Health Commission, said Monday that the number of active infections in China dropped to 481, the lowest number recorded since January 23.

Multiple activists, journalists and ordinary internet users have already vanished after criticising Beijing's approach to the crisis as the country tries to control the COVID-19 narrative.

Elodie Clouvel, a world champion modern pentathlete, said she believed she and her partner - another athlete - caught the virus while at the competition in Wuhan from October 18 to 27.

The patient, named as Cui An, tested positive for COVID-19 in early February and had been hooked to a life-support machine for more than two months when surgeons performed the operation.

The report, which was based on commercially-available cellphone location data - indicates that there might've been a 'hazardous event' at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology in early October.

The supplies were sent from the coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan to Sydney Airport on April 8.

International pressure was last night building on Beijing following the leak of a bombshell intelligence dossier which accuses China of having lied about the origins of Covid-19.