The World Health Organization will finally send a team of 10 international scientists into Wuhan, China, early next month to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, more than one year after it was discovered, BBC News reported.
China has maintained it began in a wet market in the city, where animals are sold for food. Trump administration intelligence says it has traced the outbreak to a virology lab in the city, nearby the wet market.
The United States, which has accused China of having hidden the outbreak's extent, has called for a "transparent" WHO-led investigation and criticized its terms, which allowed Chinese scientists to do the first phase of preliminary research.
"It's really not about finding a guilty country," Fabian Leendertz of Germany's Robert Koch Institute said, per BBC.
"It's about trying to understand what happened and then see if, based on those data, we can try to reduce the risk in the future."
Thea Fischer, a Danish member, said that the team would leave "just after New Year's" for a six-week mission, including two weeks of quarantine on arrival.
"Phase 1 was supposed to be completed by now, according to the terms of reference, and we should have some results," she told Reuters. "If that's what we get when we come to China...that would be fantastic. Then we are already in phase 2."
A Western diplomat said that the team was expected to leave in early January, ahead of WHO's executive board opening Jan. 18, adding: "There is strong pressure on China and on WHO."
Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO's top expert in animal diseases, said last month the mission would like to interview market workers about how they were infected with the virus.
"There is nothing to indicate that it would be man-made," he added.
Chinese state media have suggested the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in Wuhan, citing its presence on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers claiming it had been circulating in Europe last year.
Some Western countries have voiced concern at the delay in sending international experts.
One senior Western diplomat complained of a lack of transparency while experts were not on the ground talking to clinicians and researchers or inspecting lab samples.
But another Western diplomat said that the mission was on a "good footing" and the WHO had to accept China's terms to secure access.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.