WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO) officials arrived in China at the weekend to investigate the source of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan a year after the city locked down its 11 million citizens.

The team will self-isolate for the first 14 days of the visit, which is expected to last a month.

They will work alongside Chinese scientists to try and identify how and if coronavirus made the species jump from animals to humans.

The arrival of the health experts came a year to the day since Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, was locked down, as the Chinese government moved swiftly to contain the disease.

The province endured a 76-day shutdown, as the government established a test & trace system and put in place measures to stop the further spread of Covid-19.

Despite a propaganda barrage from the West aimed at undermining China’s impressive results in dealing with Covid-19, the WHO has consistently praised Beijing for its efforts.

China’s medical facilities were informed of an outbreak of an unknown strand of pneumonia in Wuhan on December 30 2019. Authorities moved quickly. The following day the public was advised to wear face masks and not to go to enclosed public places or gather.

China’s Centre for Disease Control sequenced the virus’s genome within 10 days of receiving its first report from Wuhan. It immediately shared the information on the genome sequence with the WHO on January 11 2020 and the WHO worked with China to produce a full field report in mid-February.

But other countries, including Britain, the US and Brazil consistently downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19, ignoring the reports from China and the available scientific advice.

China has just 1,750 active cases and has had 4,635 deaths in total. It has recorded a total of just over 88,000 cases.