WHO mission team leaves Wuhan hospital

The World Health Organisation mission to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited a hospital in Wuhan on Friday.In their first site visit since leaving quarantine, the team inspected the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.

WHO officials said late Thursday that the mission planned to visit hospitals, markets like the Huanan Seafood Market that were linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and laboratories such as the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

The mission has become politically charged, as China seeks to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak.A single visit by scientists is unlikely to confirm the virus's origins; pinning down an outbreak's animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.

One possibility is that a wildlife poacher might have passed the virus to traders who carried it to Wuhan. The Chinese government has promoted theories, with little evidence, that the outbreak might have started with imports of frozen seafood tainted with the virus, a notion roundly rejected by international scientists and agencies.A possible focus for investigators is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of China's top virus research labs, it built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.