Coronavirus may have been spreading in Wuhan in August: Harvard study

The research, which has not been peer-reviewed by other scientists, used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan - where the disease was first identified in late 2019.

Beijing dismissed as “ridiculous” a Harvard Medical School study of hospital traffic and search engine data that suggested the new coronavirus may already have been spreading in China last August, and scientists said it offered no convincing evidence of when the outbreak began.

The research, which has not been peer-reviewed by other scientists, used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan — where the disease was first identified in late 2019 — and data for symptom-related queries on search engines for things such as “cough” and “diarrhoea”.

The study’s authors said increased hospital traffic and symptom search data in Wuhan preceded the documented start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in December 2019.

On the new theory of the virus origin, the paper says, "Scientists collected viral genome samples from 326 patients in Shanghai between January 20 and February 25.

They identified two major clades, both of which included cases diagnosed in early December 2019. The scientists noticed that genomes of six patients with contact history related to the Huanan seafood market fell into one kind of clade while those of three other patients diagnosed in the same period but without exposure to the market clustered into the other clade, suggesting multiple origins of transmission in Shanghai."

Earlier the Chinese study into the origin of the novel coronavirus have suggested that the virus, which caused havoc on the globe, had its origin in the famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. However, the US, especially its President Donald Trump, was not convinced by the claims of China on the origin of the virus.