Covid-19 origins report postponed: WHO

GENEVA: An international expert team that visited China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 has postponed publishing their report, which will now likely appear next week, the WHO said on Tuesday.

"The report is simply not ready", World Health Organisation spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters. "What we hear from the technical experts, from the mission members, is that the report most likely will come out now next week," he added.

The highly-anticipated report is expected to examine a range of theories about how the virus first jumped from animals to humans, which the experts looked into during their four-week mission to Wuhan -- the city where the first Covid-19 cases were identified.

Experts believe that the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 originally came from bats, and crossed into humans via an intermediate animal, but remain unsure on when and how that happened.

During a lengthy press conference in Wuhan on February 9 at the end of the mission, the experts and their Chinese counterparts made clear that they could not yet draw any firm conclusions.

But the world has been eagerly anticipating the report ever since for more insight into how the experts ranked a number of hypotheses, including theories about wild animal meat brought to Wuhan from southern China, one about a lab accident and another about the virus being imported in frozen food.

The team had initially planned to quickly publish a preliminary report, but that plan was shelved in February without a clear explanation. Then WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced at the beginning of March that the full report would be published sometime this week, promising to give member states an advance peek at the conclusions.

The repeated delays have sparked renewed criticism of the UN health body’s slow response to a demand by its member states last May for an independent, international team to assist Chinese experts in probing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. It took months to select the 10 international experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, and diplomatic wrangling with China delayed the mission further.

In the end, they arrived in Wuhan more than a year after the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes Covid-19 disease -- were first discovered there, in December 2019. Since then, nearly 2.7 million people have died worldwide and the global economy lies in tatters.

Lindmeier said on Tuesday that the team of experts, who are drafting the report with their Chinese counterparts, were still finalising the document. "The experts are drawing it up together, and... the more people involved, the more people will have to have a say in it," he said.

"They want to get it right. That is the important part."Meanwhile, US manufacturer Moderna on Tuesday said it has started Covid-19 vaccine trials for children aged from 6 months to under 12 years old, with plans to enroll about 6,750 participants.

"We are pleased to begin this Phase 2/3 study of mRNA-1273 in healthy children in the US and Canada," said CEO Stephane Bancel in a statement. "This pediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our Covid-19 vaccine candidate in this important younger age population."

US health authorities say that fewer children have been sick with Covid-19 compared to adults, but they can be infected and can spread the virus. Most infected children have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.

School officials across the US are under pressure to fully reopen as soon as possible, but many say they need portable classrooms or shorter school days to meet social distancing rules. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have all been authorized for emergency use, and the companies are set to deliver more than enough to cover the entire US adult population by mid-year.

In a related development, restaurant and hotel staff on Tuesday set up tables and beds in public squares across Lithuania, urging the government to provide more support to the pandemic-hit hospitality industry.

Menus were replaced with signs saying "Last Supper", tables were covered with black tablecloths and funeral wreaths were laid by hotels beds in front of the government building in the capital Vilnius.

Similar demonstrations were held in other cities in the Baltic EU state. "The whole hospitality sector -- restaurants, bars and especially hotels -- is going through very difficult times and we need much more support from our government," Juozas Vainora, a hotel employee, told AFP.

French cafe owner Vincent Degeorge said: "Restaurants, tourism is just dying, everything is going to bankruptcy. I don’t want to die without fighting."

Evalda Siskauskiene, chief executive of the hotels and restaurants association, said the sector as a whole had lost more than 300 million euros ($358 million) because of the pandemic and a wave of bankruptcies could be imminent if the government does not increase subsidies.