An advance team from the World Health Organisation (WHO) has left for China to organise an investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus which sparked the global pandemic, according to Reuters.

"The two WHO experts, specialists in animal health and epidemiology, will work with Chinese scientists to determine the scope and itinerary of the investigation," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a UN briefing in Geneva.

“One of the big issues that everybody is interested in, and of course that's why we're sending an animal health expert, is to look at whether or not it jumped from species to a human and what species it jumped from,” Harris said.