SHANGHAI, June 25 (Reuters) – The virus that causes COVID-19 may have started to spread in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the city of Wuhan, news shows Friday study.
Researchers at the British University of Kent estimated that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared between early October and mid-November 2019, according to an article published in the scientific journal PLOS Pathogens.
According to their estimates, the most likely date for the virus to emerge is November 17, 2019, and it had likely already spread worldwide by January 2020.
The first official case of COVID-19 in China was detected in December 2019 and was linked to the Wuhan seafood wholesale market.
However, some of the early cases had no known link to this market, implying that SARS-CoV-2 was already in circulation.
A joint study released by China and the World Health Organization (WHO) at the end of March acknowledged that there may have been human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.
In a prepublication released this week, Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle recovered deleted sequencing data from the first cases of COVID-19 in China.
These data showed that samples taken from the Wuhan market were “not representative” of SARS-CoV-2 as a whole and that it was a variant of a progenitor sequence that previously circulated and s ‘has 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.
(David Stanway, French version Camille Raynaud)
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