• Direct: latest news of the coronavirus
  • De-escalation: what can be done and when in each phase
  • Study. Robot portrait of the ICU patient in Covid-19: man older than 56 years, fever higher than 39º and high respiratory rate

In mid-February, thanks to snapshots of the city of Wuhan captured by a satellite from the American company Planet, everyone was able to understand the extent of confinement by a virus that had then left 28,000 infected and 560 dead. From a bird's eye view, a city with more inhabitants than New York was completely deserted .

Images that drew even more attention when compared to the saturated traffic of this city in other captures made by the Planet satellite during the summer of 2019. In those months, a priori , there was no trace of coronavirus. Officially, China started to track down rare pneumonia in Wuhan with the first patients on December 8. Although, according to the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post based on official documents from the Chinese government, the first diagnosed cases would go back to November 17 . It was not until 45 days later that the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission would notify the WHO of a "cluster of pneumonia cases" in the city.

The theory that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was earlier in the morning than previously thought has been reopened in recent weeks. First, due to the testimonies of many of the athletes who claimed to have passed the symptoms after participating in the World Military Games in Wuhan (October 18, 9,693 athletes from 110 countries participated).

Now, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School, satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan, as well as internet search trends, show that the coronavirus may have spread in China in early August. Dr. John Brownstein, who led the investigation, told ABC News that the team of investigators used similar techniques from intelligence agencies and analyzed 350 commercial satellite images, comparing them to captures from the same location - five Wuhan hospitals - a year earlier. The Harvard team saw a sharp increase in volume starting in August 2019 and culminating in a spike in December.

Using images from October 2018, the researchers counted 171 cars in the parking lots of one of Wuhan's largest hospitals, Tianyou Hospital. A year later, the data showed 285 vehicles in the same lots, a 67% increase and a 90% traffic increase over the same period at other Wuhan hospitals.

Dr. Brownstein, who is also director of innovation at Boston Children's Hospital, also added that the increase in traffic coincided with high queries on the Chinese symptom finder Baidu that would later be determined to be associated with the new coronavirus. "The data is actually especially compelling because we saw increases in people looking for gastrointestinal illnesses, diarrhea, increasing to a level that we haven't seen at all, historically, and now we know that gastrointestinal symptoms are really an important marker for Covid- 19 ", he added. "A large percentage of people who actually ended up testing positive in Wuhan actually had symptoms of diarrhea," continued Brownstein.

This Tuesday, during a press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying answered a question about this study saying the analysis was "ridiculous, incredibly ridiculous, to come to this conclusion based on superficial observations such as volume of traffic".

The Harvard report coincides, at least in time, with research published in April by a team from Cambridge University, which maintained that the coronavirus would not have originated in Wuhan, but in southern China between September 13. and on December 7. An algorithm-based calculation that tracks the global movement of organisms through the mutation of their genes , analyzing 1,001 complete sequences of the virus from around the world. This report, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , analyzes the evolution of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus comparing it with that of the bat from which it comes, with which it coincides in 96%, and whose species was located in 2013 in the caves of the southern Yunnan province, although the new coronavirus has hundreds of mutations from its own.

"The virus may have mutated into its end of 'human efficiency' months ago, but it stayed inside a bat, another animal, or even people for a while without infecting others," said Peter Forster, research leader and geneticist at Cambridge. "Our findings may corroborate the hypothesis that the virus naturally arose in southern China and was potentially already circulating at the time of the Wuhan cluster," said Dr. Brownstein of Harvard.

The same line - the possibility that the coronavirus did not arise in Wuhan - was also slipped by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, head of the Chinese National Health Commission, a couple of months ago during an interview on public television. Zhong has been the visible medical head of the Asian giant in the fight against the pandemic. Although his statements could also be interpreted in a more political tone since he made them after a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry pointed out that the coronavirus had been brought by the US army to Wuhan during the October Military Games.

A couple of days ago, the so-called "White Paper" was presented in Beijing, a long dossier that describes, from the point of view of China, what the struggle of the second world power against Covid-19 has been like. Self-praise for their management is not lacking in the document . And they point out that they kept the World Health Organization informed in detail since January 3.

According to an Associated Press (AP) investigation, China did not share key information during the critical early days of the pandemic. AP had access last week to several recordings of meetings at the WHO in which officials privately complained that, during the week of January 6, China was not sharing the data necessary to assess the risk of the virus to the rest. of the world . Starting with the delay in spreading the genome for more than a week after three Chinese laboratories had already deciphered it.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Science and health
  • Coronavirus
  • Covid 19
  • Infectious diseases
  • Respiratory diseases
  • Descaled

Health Health records 48 deaths and 361 new infections in the last 24 hours

HealthA preliminary study reveals that the average mortality of Covid-19 in Spain is 4%

Character Adele's Sirtfood diet: like the Mediterranean but with more marketing

See links of interest

  • News
  • Translator
  • Programming
  • Calendar
  • Horoscope
  • Classification
  • League calendar
  • Films
  • Schools
  • Masters
  • Cut notes
  • Rich
  • Universities
  • Themes
  • Pau Dones