A research study based on satellite images, analysing hospital travel patterns in China’s Wuhan, conducted by Harvard Medical School has claimed that COVID-19 could have started there in around August 2019.
The research also analysed search engine data from Baidu, China’s largest search engine, and found an increase in searches for “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,” it noted.
The research, however, doesn’t confirm the findings as directly related to the new coronavirus but states that “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.
There was a steep increase in hospital car park occupancy in August 2019, the satellite images revealed.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed the findings saying, “I think it is ridiculous, incredibly ridiculous, to come up with this conclusion based on superficial observations such as traffic volume.”
The research can be viewed: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42669767
