Massachusetts: According to a research done at the Harvard Medical School, the coronavirus is likely to have been infecting people and spreading further in China from August last year, which means that China knew about the virus way before it has claimed to. This was based on the satellite images received of the hospital travel patterns of patients and data of search engines, however, China denied the entire allegation and dismissed the report as ‘ridiculous’.
The research used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan, the first place where coronavirus was detected in the late 2019 and data from search engines in China which included queries made on symptoms related to cornavirus like “cough” and “diarrhoea”.
“Increased hospital traffic and symptom search data in Wuhan preceded the documented start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in December 2019,” according to the research.
“While we cannot confirm if the increased volume was directly related to the new virus, our evidence supports other recent work showing that emergence happened before identification at the Huanan Seafood market (in Wuhan).”
“These findings also corroborate the hypothesis that the virus emerged naturally in southern China and was potentially already circulating at the time of the Wuhan cluster,” the research said.
The images showed an increased number of cars parks in hospitals in August, 2019 which were a lot from the usual figures.
The report mentioned, “In August, we identify a unique increase in searches for diarrhoea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data.”
When the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying was questioned about the research during a regular press conference, she dismissed the report.
“I think it is ridiculous, incredibly ridiculous, to come up with this conclusion based on superficial observations such as traffic volume,” she said.
The official abstract from the Harvard Library states that, “The global COVID-19 pandemic was originally linked to a zoonotic spillover event in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market in November or December of 2019. However, recent evidence suggests that the virus may have already been circulating at the time of the outbreak. Here we use previously validated data streams – satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease related terms – to investigate this possibility. We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late Summer and early Fall 2019. While queries of the respiratory symptom “cough” show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, “diarrhea” is a more COVID-19 specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic. The increase of both signals precede the documented start of the COVID-19 pandemic in December, highlighting the value of novel digital sources for surveillance of emerging pathogens.”
China has often been accused of hiding vital information regarding the deadly virus, although it has denied every allegation.
