China will continue to support study on origins of COVID-19: Senior expert

Investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus will not end and China will keep supporting the World Health Organization's probe in the future, a senior expert with China's health authority said.

The WHO and China released a joint report into the origins of COVID-19 on Tuesday, pointing to transmission from bats to another animal and subsequently, to humans as the most likely way the pandemic began.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Central China's Wuhan in 2019, some reports indicated that there might have been some cases that emerged even earlier, said Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and one of the Chinese members of the joint investigation team probing the novel coronavirus' origins.

"The place where a disease breaks out is usually not its origin," he said at a news conference on Wednesday. "And it takes time to conduct further research with other countries to confirm those reports."

He said those reports provided clues to confirm when and how the virus transmitted from animals to human.

In the previous studies of some viruses that caused a pandemic, Feng said probes on the virus origins were always conducted jointly by several countries or regions.

"Only with joint efforts from countries around the world, the probe on the novel coronavirus will see a step forward," he said.