Thai public health officials this afternoon will respond later this afternoon to a report suggesting Bangkok’s sprawling Chatuchak Market was the origin of the global pandemic that has ravaged the world for over a year now.
The Disease Control Department is expected to forcefully deny speculation raised in a Danish news report that the massive open market could have spawned Sars-Cov-2 amid a WHO inquiry’s belief it may have originated in Southeast Asia rather than China.
Denmark’s Politiken published Monday questioning whether Chatuchak was indeed “the place that brought the coronavirus to Wuhan.” It cited Danish epidemiologist Thea Kolsen Fischer, who was on a recent WHO fact-finding mission to China that said Southeast Asia could be a source of the virus.
The team this month complained that its investigation was hampered by China’s refusal to hand over critical data. While its probe did not rule out that the virus could have emerged as believed in Wuhan, Beijing immediately spun its findings as evidence that it didn’t.
When the WHO results were announced earlier this month, Chinese state media began promoting the idea the virus emerged in Southeast Asia. A story in The Global Times quoted another member of the WHO team first .
“There was a virus from Thailand close to the SARS-CoV-2, and also Japan and Cambodia. Ecohealth Alliance is already starting our work in tracing their origins,” the paper quoted Peter Daszak.
The first known cases of what would later be named COVID-19 were found in the Wuhan Huanan seafood market, with theories that it came from a bat or pangolin.
At Chatuchak, rows of live animals including illicit wildlife are sold in dank quarters mostly out of sight of the thousands of tourists who pack it on weekends for T-shirts, souvenirs and tchotchkes.
Politiken reported Fisher’s belief that those exotic animals sold at Chatuchak, including snakes, meerkats, spiders and bats, – the latter of which in China’s Wuhan was initially blamed to be the cause of coronavirus – and was visited by thousands of people from the globe.
Politiken is a daily Copenhagen broadsheet founded in 1884.
This article, Thailand to address theory coronavirus emerged at Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia’s leading alternative media company.
