SARS - 2 will soon have real-time tissue samples

The samples are kept in the Wuhan Blood Center and are thought to span 2019, providing real-time tissue samples from a wide swath of the population in the Chinese city where SARS–CoV - 2 is thought to have infected humans first.

The blood banks are retained for two years, Chinese officials have said, in case they are needed as evidence in any lawsuits related to the blood donations they are from.

That two-year waiting period will soon expire for the key months of October and November 2019 when most experts think the virus could have infected humans first. An official from China's National Health Commission confirmed preparation for testing is currently underway and told CNN that testing would happen once the two-year limit was reached.

This represents the closest in the world we've seen real-time samples to help us understand the timing of the outbreak event, said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. They absolutely will contain vital clues, said Maureen Miller, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. She urged China to allow foreign experts to observe the process. No one will believe any results China reports unless there are qualified observers at the very least, she said. The head of the Chinese team working on the WHO investigation, Liang Wannian, said in July news conference that China would test samples, adding that once Chinese experts have the results they will be able to send them both to Chinese and foreign experts. Liang said the samples came from the opening tube of a donor blood pouch, stored and shut, and Chinese experts had made several assessments and evaluations on the testing methods and action plan, which will be implemented after the expiry of the two-year limit. If stored correctly, the samples could contain vital signs of the first antibodies that humans make against the disease, experts said. Liang said that in July that while the first reported case was in Wuhan on December 8, our research and previous related research papers of Chinese scientists fully suggest December 8 is probably not the primary case. There may be other cases which happen previously. Dr. William Schaffner, from Vanderbilt University’s infectious disease division, said the samples presented a fascinating opportunity. You would like to go back and find out when the virus started to leave fingerprints in the human population in China during this time. We need to know how Covid - 19 emerged so that we can stop it happening again. The samples might even indicate where and their age and occupation when Miller added, who was first infected, Miller said It is common practice to de-identify samples, she said. Honestly, you could strip it down to basic demographics, gender, age, neighborhood where they lived. All of these data will be available. Schaffner proposed the samples could be transported to Geneva, or another neutral destination, so as to permit WHO experts to take part in the testing. He said two possible issues with the samples could be the integrity of blood samples, ensuring they had not been recently created, but also how representative of the population as a whole the blood donors were. Miller said many samples would most likely have been taken from asymptomatic individuals so they'll represent healthy cases. But as we've learned over the course of the Pandemic, asymptomatic cases fuel the pandemic. Huang said it was unclear to what extent the outside world would trust the findings as credible or convincing, and the testing marked an opportunity for China to tell the world that they are serious about depoliticizing the origins probe. The Biden administration conducted a 90 - day review of the intelligence over how the virus originated, yet an unclassified report had officials still considering both natural transmission from animal to humans and a lab leak as plausible theories, but unable to determine which was the more likely. At receiving a classified version of the report, Joe Biden said: Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in China yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it. China has insisted it had been transparent and helpful to the WHO probe, and pointed to its most recent statement about the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory, directed to unproven claims about Fort Detrick, US lab in Maryland, and the need to examine its recent past.