China refused to give raw data on early Covid-19 cases to a World Health Organisation-(WHO) led team probing the origins of the pandemic, one of the team's investigators said, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.

The team had requested raw patient data on the 174 cases of Covid-19 that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team.

Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.

“That's standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.

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