China coronavirus investigation team and date of visit still to be decided

International experts will visit Wuhan, UN agency confirms, but group is still being assembled

July advance party spent two weeks in quarantine and did not visit the central Chinese city where first cases reported

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World Health Organisation executive director Mike Ryan has told a press conference the agency is still putting together its coronavirus investigation team. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:48pm, 28 Aug 2020Updated: 10:08pm, 28 Aug 2020

The World Health Organisation is still putting together an expert team to look into the source of Covid-19 and says it will travel to Wuhan – the original epicentre of the pandemic – to begin the study on an unspecified date.

Mike Ryan, director of the WHO’s emergencies programme, said the two-member advance team to China in July spent two weeks in quarantine outside Beijing and a week in the capital meeting and videoconferencing with Chinese officials and experts.

Responding to questions by the South China Morning Post at a press conference on Thursday, Ryan confirmed the advance team did not go to Wuhan but instead prepared the terms of reference for the expert team that is yet to begin its study in the central Chinese city.

The WHO has been quiet about the names of the two experts and vague until now on the itinerary of the advance team’s July visit, though it said earlier that international experts would start their investigations in Wuhan.

Speaking in the same conference, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the advance team had not intended to go to Wuhan in July. “It was not their intention to start the study and they had no plan to travel to Wuhan,” he said.

“The international experts are being put together [now] and of course naturally they will travel to Wuhan to start the study because it is the basics of enquiries like this to start the study where the first report came from.”

Neither Ghebreyesus nor Ryan gave a date for when the actual mission would start. While the size, make-up and date of the mission are still unknown, it is also unclear if the team will be required to go through two weeks of quarantine before work begins.

“An international team is being called together right now and many countries have expressed interest in participating in that,” Ryan said, adding the UN agency was also reaching out to its partners in the global response network for experts to join the group.