A team from the World Health Organization on Friday began face-to-face talks with Chinese experts over the origins of the novel coronavirus in the central city of Wuhan, where it was first detected in late 2019.
The WHO group, composed of 10 experts, is set to visit a seafood market in Wuhan, at which many people were confirmed to have contracted the virus in the early days of the outbreak.
The experts are also planning to examine a research laboratory in the city, the WHO said, amid rumors that the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease was accidentally released from there.
The focus is on how much information China will disclose, as more than one year has already passed since the first infection case was spotted in Wuhan, a business and transportation hub with a population of some 11 million.
The seafood market, where wild animals like bats and snakes were also traded and consumed, has been closed since January 2020.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, said last year that he was confident the virus originated from the infectious diseases lab, adding he could punish China for its lackluster response that triggered the pandemic.
The WHO team, including Ken Maeda, a veterinary microbiologist at Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases, is likely to stay in Wuhan through early February.
The experts, who started a full-fledged investigation on Thursday after quarantining for two weeks, are scheduled to interview people who had been infected and medical workers taking care of such patients in the initial stage of the virus spread, the WHO said.
On Friday morning, three microbuses, which carried dozens of Chinese experts, arrived at a hotel, where the WHO team members are staying. Later in the day, they left the hotel and visited a hospital in Wuhan.
During the quarantine period, the WHO experts engaged in online information exchanges with their Chinese counterparts.
The WHO team originally had planned to visit China earlier this month, but its arrival was delayed after it took longer than expected for Beijing to finalize granting permission for the experts to enter the country.
WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus had said that he was "very disappointed" with China.
Although the WHO sent a small group of experts to China for a preliminary investigation in July last year, they did not visit the seafood market or the laboratory.
Since first being detected in Wuhan, the virus erupted into a pandemic that has infected over 100 million people and caused more than 2.1 million deaths across the globe, according to data by Johns Hopkins University.
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