A team of 10 international scientists will travel to the Chinese city of Wuhan next month to investigate the origins of Covid-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
Beijing has been reluctant to agree to an independent inquiry and it has taken many months of negotiations for the WHO to be allowed access to the city.
The virus is thought to have come from a market in the city selling animals.
But the search for the source has led to tensions, notably with the US.
President Donald Trump's administration has accused China of trying to conceal the initial outbreak.
A biologist on the team travelling to Wuhan told the Associated Press news agency that the WHO was not seeking to apportion blame, but rather to prevent future outbreaks.
"It's really not about finding a guilty country," Fabian Leendertz of Germany's Robert Koch Institute said.
"It's about trying to understand what happened and then see if, based on those data, we can try to reduce the risk in the future."
