This photo taken and handed out by the Vatican Media on March 12 shows Pope Francis celebrating a morning mass at the Santa Marta chapel in the Vatican as part of precautionary measures against the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Photo: AFP

A report in an Italian newspaper that Pope Francis is planning to visit Wuhan, a city hit hardest by the COVID-19 epidemic in China is "totally fake news," insiders told the Global Times.

Italian newspaper La Verità recently claimed that Vatican City is secretly planning a trip for Pope Francis to visit Wuhan and other cities in China, such as Beijing, after that.

"It's fake news, totally fake news," Francesco Sisci, a senior researcher at the Center of European Studies at the Renmin University of China and a Vatican affairs expert, told the Global Times. 

He said the report came out in a newspaper in Italy a few weeks ago, and that everybody he talked to in the Vatican said it was totally fake.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times that he has no information about this and also thinks it is not true. "Nevertheless, the Pope sometimes does surprising things and visits places with a lot of suffering," said the bishop. 

Pope Francis called on Sunday for an all-embracing vision of the world after the pandemic, saying that moving on without global solidarity or excluding sectors of society from the recovery would result in "an even worse virus."