Home Business China’s first Covid case could have been in October 2019, says UK study

China’s first Covid case could have been in October 2019, says UK study

by Bioreports
11 views
china’s-first-covid-case-could-have-been-in-october-2019,-says-uk-study

A student receives a Covid vaccine at a university in Wuhan, the city where the virus is believed to have erupted - GETTY IMAGES

A student receives a Covid vaccine at a university in Wuhan, the city where the virus is believed to have erupted – GETTY IMAGES

The virus that causes Covid-19 could have started spreading in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the central city of Wuhan, a new study showed on Friday.

Researchers from Britain’s University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.

The most likely date for the virus’s emergence was November 17, 2019, and it had probably already spread globally by January 2020, they estimated.

China’s first official Covid-19 case was in December 2019 and was linked to Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market.

However, some early cases had no known connection with Huanan, implying that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating before it reached the market.

A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.

In a paper released this week as a preprint, Jessie Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle recovered deleted sequencing data from the early cases of Covid-19 in China.

The data showed that samples taken from the Huanan market were “not representative” of SARS-CoV-2 as a whole, and were a variant of a progenitor sequence that was circulating earlier and spread to other parts of China.

Critics said the deletion of the data was further evidence that China was trying to cover up the origins of Covid-19.

“Why would scientists ask international databases to delete key data that informs us about how Covid-19 began in Wuhan?” said Alina Chan, a researcher with Harvard’s Broad Institute, writing on Twitter. “That’s the question you can answer for yourselves.”

Serum samples still needed to be tested to make a stronger case about Covid-19’s origins, said Stuart Turville, associate professor at the Kirby Institute, an Australian medical research organisation who was responding to the University of Kent study.

“Unfortunately with the current pressure of the lab leak hypothesis and the sensitivities in doing this follow-up research in China, it may be some time till we see reports like that,” he said.

Read more: Why the Covid Wuhan lab escape theory, dead and buried months ago, has risen again

You may also like

Leave a Comment