WHO team to begin face-to-face meetings with China experts

WUHAN, China (AP) — World Health Organization experts are to begin face-to-face meetings with their Chinese counterparts Friday in the central city of Wuhan at the start of the team's long-awaited fact-finding mission into the origins of the coronavirus.

Those meetings should be followed by the first field visits in and around the industrial and transport hub on Friday, WHO said on Twitter but did not give further details about the team’s agenda.

It said the team had already requested “detailed underlying data” and planned to speak with early responders and some of the first COVID-19 patients.

“All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows the science in their work to understand the origins of the COVID19 virus,” WHO tweeted. “As members start their field visits on Friday, they should receive the support, access and the data they need."

The team members had spent the past two weeks in a required quarantine, during which they had been communicating with Chinese officials by videoconferences to lay the groundwork for field visits.

At their new hotel, some were seen waving from balconies, and people arriving aboard three buses went inside, possibly to join in the preliminary meeting between WHO and Chinese scientists.

WHO, which is based in Geneva, said late Thursday on Twitter that its team plans to visit hospitals, markets like the Huanan Seafood Market linked to many of the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and laboratories at facilities like 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.

Confirmation of the origins of the virus is likely to take years; pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir typically...