Satellite data shows that the novel coronavirus now known as COVID-19 may have hit China as early as October last year.
Spikes in traffic around major hospitals in Wuhan in the autumn suggest the virus may have been present before the outbreak was first reported by the media, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School.
The study compared hospital car parks in 2019 to 2018.
Internet searches from the Wuhan region also showed people were looking up terms on the Chinese search engine Baidu, such as ‘cough’ and ‘diarrhoea’, which came to be associated with COVID-19.
“We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late summer and early fall 2019,” the scientists wrote in a paper released online but not peer-reviewed.
China meanwhile has angrily to the claims by scientists at Harvard.
