The virus that causes COVID-19 could have been circulating in other regions before it was identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, a top expert at China's health authority said on Tuesday.
Liang Wannian, an expert with China's Health Commission, also told a press briefing at the end of a nearly one-month visit to Wuhan by a World Health Organization-led team that there had been no substantial spread of the virus in the city before the late 2019 outbreak.
(Reporting by Josh Horwitz in Wuhan and David Stanway in Shanghai; Editing by Gareth Jones)
