The World Health Organisation's (WHO) international mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 will explore all avenues and is not looking to find “guilty” parties, a team member told AFP.

Investigators will head to China in January and to Wuhan, where the first cases were detected 12 months ago in the pandemic that has swept the world, causing giant global health and economic crises.

“The meetings we had so far with Chinese colleagues were really productive and very good,” said Fabian Leendertz from the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's central disease control body.

“My impression, at the moment, is that the Chinese — on the government, but also on the population level — they're really interested in finding out what happened.”

Leendertz, 48, is an expert in zoonoses — infectious diseases that cross the species barrier — and is among 10 eminent scientists tasked by the WHO with trying to find the origins of the novel coronavirus and work out how it jumped from animals to humans.