Coronavirus may have spread in China as far back as August: study
The deadly coronavirus could have started spreading in August when hospital parking lots in Wuhan began to fill up and web searches for symptoms jumped, a new report out of Harvard Medical School suggests.
Researchers took a page out of a spy novel to study satellite images and keywords — including “cough” and “diarrhea” — to bolster their theory that COVID-19 may have been infecting people in southern China late last summer or early fall.
China’s notorious lack of transparency, one of the authors of the Harvard report explained, forced them to look for other measures to dig for trends of “social disruption” — in this case, the highly infectious coronavirus.
“We were trying to think of ways to get access to data to get around privacy, security or bureaucracy reasons,” said Elaine Nsoesie, an assistant professor of global health at Boston University who co-authored the report with a team from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
“It’s challenging to use this data, but we don’t know when the next outbreak will happen,” Nsoesie told the Herald Tuesday. “What we found could also inform hospitals to look at data” to see if coronavirus cases may have occurred locally in 2019.
The Harvard report also states gastrointestinal symptoms — mainly diarrhea — “may play an important role in community transmission.” That element of the virus is already being studied by researchers at MIT.
The Harvard report, posted at the Cambridge university’s DASH open source site, stated the researchers observed “an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume in late summer and early fall of 2019” in Wuhan.
Timetables of the pandemic have suggested the outbreak began in Wuhan sometime in December 2019.
In a chilling passage in the Harvard report, the team writes that evidence indicates “the virus emerged in southern China and may have already spread internationally, and adapted for efficient human transmission by the time it was detected in late December.”
Also, the 10-page study adds that prior reports linking the source of COVID-19 to the Huanan Seafood wet market in Wuhan fail to stress “no direct connection” to the market — where caged wild animals are killed on the spot — in 14 cases of coronavirus.
But it is clear, they add, that high-resolution satellite images show parking lots at six hospitals in Wuhan filling up at a “steep increase” — up to 90% year-over-year — starting in August 2019 “and culminating with a peak in December 2019.”
They also noted a jump in web searches at baidu.com — China’s version of Google — at about the same time for coronavirus symptoms.
China did not inform the World Health Organization of the novel coronavirus until Dec. 31.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3heAdAP
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