WHO team visits Wuhan hospital that took in first COVID-19 patients

The team of World Health Business specialists investigating the origins of the coronavirus met staff Saturday at the Wuhan hospital which received the first confirmed COVID-19 cases, on day time two of fieldwork on the highly scrutinised visit to China.

The group was driven to the Jinyintan Hospital, the first hospital to receive officially-diagnosed COVID-19 patients in late 2019, as the horrors of the virus emerged in the central Chinese city.

Information on the trip have already been scant so far, with the media kept in arm's length and facts on the itinerary dribbling out via tweets from the WHO experts instead of China's communist authorities.

In a tweet, team member Peter Daszak welcomed a healthcare facility visit as an "Important possibility to talk directly w/ medics who were on the floor at that critical time fighting COVID!"

The mission includes heavy political baggage.

It has been beset by delays, with China refusing gain access to until mid-January, while there are question marks above what the authorities can hope to look for a year following the virus first emerged.

On Friday, the WHO's emergencies director Micheal Ryan sought to manage expectations.

Success "isn't measured necessarily found in absolutely finding a resource on the first mission", he told a news conference found in Geneva. "This is an elaborate business, but what we have to do is accumulate all of the info... and arrive to an assessment concerning how much even more we know about the origins of the condition and what further studies may be had a need to elucidate that."

The other day China warned the United States against "political interference" during the trip, after the White House demanded a "robust and clear" investigation.

The WHO insists the probe will stick tightly to the science behind how the virus jumped from animals -- thought to be bats -- to humans.

The team is likely to go to the Huanan market thought to have already been the first major cluster of infections, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs, in what the WHO's Ryan referred to as a "incredibly busy, busy schedule".

Beijing is desperate to defang criticism of its handling of the chaotic early stages of the outbreak.

It has refocused attention at home -- and abroad -- about its handling of and recovery from the outbreak.

Since seeping beyond China's borders, the pandemic has ripped across the world killing a lot more than two million persons and wrecking economies.

China, with a comparatively low reported death toll of 4,636, provides bounced back. It has swiftly locked down areas where any situations are located, tested millions and limited happen to be snuff out the crisis.

The Chinese economy grew by 2.3 percent regardless of the outbreak previous year and its leadership misses few chances to feature the country's resilience and renewal.

A good Chinese foreign ministry spokesman on Friday flagged the WHO visit as "part of global research" in to the pandemic.

"It is not a study," Zhao Lijian told reporters.