A new transparent global system should be set up for probing disease outbreaks, empowering the World Health Organization to deploy investigators at short notice and reveal findings, a Covid-19 pandemic review panel said on Wednesday.

The WHO should have declared the new coronavirus outbreak in China an international emergency earlier than Jan 30, 2020, but the next month was "lost" as countries failed to take strong measures to halt the spread of the respiratory pathogen, it said...