'No field investigations' for WHO experts in China

An official from the World Health Organization on Tuesday said there was a "preliminary" team working with Chinese scientists to lay out the groundwork for a larger mission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO's health emergencies programme director, said in Geneva that the preliminary mission is "to understand what has been discovered already, what has been studied already, what the data that's available. And then from that to lay out what further studies need to be carried out and what international experts will be useful in engaging with and partnering with Chinese colleagues in order to do that."

He also said the length of the mission is undetermined.

Ryan added that two of the team's colleagues are already working remotely, while under a routine quarantine "as standard operating procedure from the Chinese side."

They are expected to meet with Chinese counterparts in Beijing to set the scope and terms of reference for a WHO-led international mission aimed at learning how the virus jumped from animals to humans.