New Delhi: In an unexpected revelation, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday said that its team did not find conclusive evidence of large outbreaks that could be related to Coronavirus prior to December 2019 in China's Wuhan, which was earlier considered epicentre of Covid-19 outbreak. Head of the WHO mission Ben Embarek said that the team found evidence of wider circulation outside the Wuhan's Huanan market in December 2019. ALSO READ | Bihar Cabinet Expansion: Shahnawaz Hussain, Sushant Singh Rajput's Cousin Included In Nitish Govt - Check Who Gets What


World Health Organisation team also informed that the animal source of the coronavirus outbreak has not yet been identified.


Embarek also said that recent the Wuhan investigation has uncovered new information, but has not dramatically changed the picture of Covid-19 outbreak. News agency Associated Press quoted a member of the WHO expert team saying that the Chinese side granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested — a level of openness that even he had not expected. 


The development comes a month after WHO expert team landed in Wuhan, more than a year after Covid-19 was detected there. Addressing the press meet, Embarek, said that the focus of the study is whether coronavirus had 'previous history' and was circulating earlier than December 2019.


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The experts from the WHO has also discarded the "controversial theory" that Covid-19 came from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Experts believe that the disease, which took lives of over 2.3 million people worldwide, originated in bats and could have been transmitted to humans via another mammal.


The WHO team of experts reached Wuhan on 14 January and after two weeks of quarantine, they visited some key sites including the Huanan seafood market, the location of the first known cluster of infections, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been doing extensive research on coronavirus.