The World Health Organization (WHO) Director General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, made a trip to Beijing for talks with President Xi Jinping and Chinese ministers and returned with an agreement on sending an international mission

In a tweet on Sunday, the WHO boss confirmed the team’s departure to China.

According to him, ” I have just been at the airport seeing off members of an advance team international expert mission to #China, led by Dr Bruce Aylward, veteran of past public health emergencies. They left for Beijing to help investigate China’s coronavirus epidemic, which authorities said on Monday had now claimed 908 lives on the mainland”.

WHO veteran, Dr Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist and emergencies expert, is heading the team of investigators.

The coronavirus outbreak has now killed more people than the SARS epidemic did globally from 2002 to 2003.

The outbreak has caused huge disruptions in China with usually busy cities becoming virtual ghost towns over the past two weeks.

The WHO declared the outbreak a global emergency on January 30, days after the Chinese central government sealed off the province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan, the epicentre of a virus that emerged in December in a seafood market.

Across mainland China, there were 3,062 new confirmed infections on Sunday, bringing the total number so far to 40,171.