The World Health Organization delegation probing the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in the central Chinese city of Wuhan faces increasingly tight restrictions, with the team being told to email questions to authorities for approval before visiting local people, Voice of America reported on Friday.

The global health body has repeatedly criticized Beijing for cooking up various reasons for delaying the expert team’s itinerary and trying to keep the team away from local people, the publicly funded U.S. broadcaster reported.

One arrangement irking the inspectors is that they have to email their proposed interview questions to the authorities at least two days before they can get in touch with the local community, VOA cited a team member saying.

Chinese authorities initially did not want the 10-person team to visit Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Huanan Seafood Market, where the first cluster of COVID-19 was believed to have originated.

The team managed to visit the institute on Wednesday, staying for 3 ½ hours and in the company of security guards and representatives from the foreign affairs ministry. They also toured the market on Jan. 31.

Chinese authorities have been reportedly keeping a tight grip on the WHO mission, with isolation measures in place which they claim are part of China’s COVID-19 prevention endeavor. Beijing insists on framing the visit as a “cooperation” rather than an “investigation.”

One team member, Peter Daszak, said in an interview with Reuters that the work, such as looking for the bats that are suspected as possible vectors and reservoirs for the virus, was vital to finding the root cause of the pandemic. This work might take several months, or even several years, he said.

The British ecologist and expert on zoonotic diseases told Radio France Internationale, however, that the expert group was subject to many constraints since the task had been politicized and become “very sensitive.”

Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times on Friday also published what it said was an exclusive report in which it claimed the expert team was already halfway through its inquiry. Many authoritative medical experts had appealed to the WHO to carry out research on the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak in other countries, the report said.

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