An international team of World Health Organization experts has visited a hospital in Wuhan, China, that saw some of the first cases of Covid in December 2019, as part of an on-the-ground investigation into the origins of the virus that caused the pandemic.
They are also expected to visit a food market linked to one of the first cluster of cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility with a large archive of bat coronaviruses, and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control.
US officials in the Trump administration had suggested, without offering evidence, that the virus could have escaped from the institute. Experts have said that was unlikely, and also overwhelmingly agreed that analysis of the new coronavirus’s genome ruled out the possibility that it was engineered by humans.
China has strongly opposed an independent investigation it could not fully control, and on Friday the foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, insisted that the delegation was not a probe. “It is part of global research, not an investigation,” he said in Beijing.
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