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 The hospital visit was the team's first in the field after two weeks
in quarantine, and a WHO spokeswoman said the group's contacts in
Wuhan will be limited to visits organised by their Chinese hosts due
to health restrictions.
"The team will go out but they will be bussed to wherever, so they
won't have any contact with the community. They will only have
contact with various individuals that are being organised as part of
the study," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a briefing in
Geneva on Friday.
After meeting with Chinese scientists earlier in the day, the team
went to the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and
Western Medicine.
Zhang Jixian, director of the hospital's department of respiratory
and critical care, has been cited by state media as the first to
report the novel coronavirus, after treating an elderly couple in
late 2019 whose CT scans showed differences from typical pneumonia.
"Extremely important 1st site visit. We are in the hospital that
treated some of the first known cases of COVID-19, meeting with the
actual clinicians & staff who did this work, having open discussion
about the details of their work," Peter Daszak, a member of the
WHO-led team, wrote on Twitter.
The team plans to visit labs, markets and hospitals during its
remaining two weeks in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first
identified in late 2019.
While an exact itinerary has not been announced, the WHO has said
the team plans to visit the seafood market at the centre of the
early outbreak as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One
hypothesis, rejected by China, is that the outbreak was caused by a
leak at the government lab.
The WHO-led probe in Wuhan has been plagued by delays, concern over
access and bickering between China and the United States, which
accused China of hiding the extent of the initial outbreak and
criticised the terms of the visit, under which Chinese experts
conducted the first phase of research.
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The WHO has sought to manage expectations. "There are no guarantees
of answers," its emergency chief, Mike Ryan, said this month.
The investigating team had been set to arrive in Wuhan earlier in
January, and China's delay of their visit drew rare public criticism
from the head of the WHO, which former U.S. President Donald Trump
accused of being "China-centric".
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said on Friday
that WHO and Chinese experts were working together to trace the
origin of the virus, but stressed that the mission was not a probe.
"It is part of a global research, not an investigation," Zhao told a
regular news conference in Beijing.
China has pushed the idea that the virus existed abroad before it
was discovered in Wuhan, with state media citing the presence of the
virus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers saying
it had been circulating in Europe in 2019.
China's foreign ministry has also hinted that the sudden closure of
a U.S. army laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland in July 2019 was
linked to the pandemic.
"At the early stage in China, it was a burden particularly for Wuhan
people when everyone was calling it a Wuhan virus, which was
humiliating," said Yang You, a 30-year-old Wuhan resident. "If it
could be traced to the source clearly, in my opinion, it could clear
either China's or Wuhan's name."
(Reporting by Gabriel Crossley and Martin Quin Pollard; Additional
reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing and Stepahnie Nebehay in
Geneva; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Michael Perry, Nick
Macfie & Simon Cameron-Moore)
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