HIGHLIGHTS
• No new countries reported cases of 2019-nCoV in the past 24 hours.
• An advanced team is currently in Beijing to prepare an international mission and to determine the questions the international team will want to learn more about: from characteristics of the virus to public health response China put in place to try to contain the virus. The group of international experts, with a range of specializations, will work with Chinese counterparts on increasing understanding of the outbreak to guide global response efforts. Since being notified of the outbreak on 31 December, the WHO Country Office in China, supported by the regional and international offices, has worked to support China, and indeed the world, to scale up the response. A small mission was sent to Wuhan mid-January, and the Director-General visited in January.
• Following WHO best practices for naming of new human infectious diseases, which were developed in consultation and collaboration with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), WHO has named the disease COVID-19, short for “coronavirus disease 2019.”
