Researchers were infected in Wuhan earlier than China acknowledged

The WHO will hold a meeting on how to proceed in its investigation into the origin of the pandemic.

In the report, the information is precisely about the time when the researchers were infected by weight, as China claims that the first case of covid-19 became known only in December 2019.

Seriously ill

A WHO official who spoke to the Wall Street Journal said the data was interesting, but would need to be further investigated and further verified.

The information comes from an investigation issued by the US State Department during the last days of the Trump administration.

According to it, several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have become ill with "symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness."

According to the newspaper, several researchers must have been infected at the same time and the symptoms must have been so severe that they needed hospital care.

Breathes new life into the lab theory

The WHO visited Wuhan earlier this year to try to clarify what caused covid-19 to start spreading and to find out what research was going on in the laboratory.

China was then skeptical of the visit and claimed that the infection did not start in China and that it may have entered Wuhan via imported frozen food.

Chief researcher Shi Zhengli at the institute is said to have told the WHO that none of the staff have antibodies and then have not been infected with covid-19 either.

A WHO investigator who was on a trip to the laboratory in March pointed out China's animal markets as the most likely source of the pandemic.

The new data from the Wall Street Journal breathes new life into the theory that covid-19 may instead have leaked from a laboratory.

In a commentary on the newspaper, China's foreign ministry described it as "extremely unlikely".