Harvard study indicates coronavirus present in China as early as August, CCP denies the claim

Beijing is calling a new Harvard Medical School study “ridiculous” after it suggested coronavirus may have been circulating in China as early as August, reports Global News.

Other scientists have not peer-reviewed the research which looked at data on search engines for symptom-related queries—looking for symptoms like “cough” and “diarrhea.” Authors also examined Wuhan’s hospital parking lots through satellite imagery.

The Authors claim that higher symptom search data and hospital traffic came before the documented starting point of the pandemic, which was in Wuhan in December 2019.

“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 Hunan Seafood market (in Wuhan),” authors said.

Expert in virology at the University of Edinburgh, Paul Digard said that use of satellite imagery and search engine data to find outbreaks “is an interesting idea with some validity.”

He did note, however that the data is only correlative and can’t identify a cause.

“It’s an interesting piece of work, but I’m not sure it takes us much further forward,” said Keith Neal, a professor of the epidemiology of infectious diseases who teaches at Britain’s Nottingham University.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry spoke about the research on Tuesday during a briefing.

“I think it is ridiculous, incredibly ridiculous, to come up with this conclusion based on superficial observations such as traffic volume,” she said.

The research found a steep rise in the amount of cars parked in hospitals in August 2019.

“In August, we identified a unique increase in searches for diarrhea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data,” it said.

Neal said that the study involved traffic at one or more children's hospitals and noted that children don’t often get sick with coronavirus.

Digard said “the study forces the correlation” by looking at Wuhan hospitals only.

“It would have been interesting — and possibly much more convincing — to have seen control analyses of other Chinese cities outside of the Hubei region,” he said.