China, WHO to step up source tracing efforts

The World Health Organization, or WHO, will send a team to China this weekend to prepare scientific plans with Chinese counterparts for indentifying the zoonotic source of COVID-19. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that the experts will develop the scope and terms of reference for a WHO-led international mission. “The mission objective is to advance the understanding of animal hosts for COVID-19 and ascertain how the disease jumped between animals and humans,” he told a virtual news conference from Geneva. China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Tuesday that China believes that tracing the origin of…