The study suggested a way earlier and more rapid spread of the contagion than is clear from the confirmed cases. This comes after a scientific paper released on Wednesday revealed that over a dozen of coronavirus test sequences that were obtained during the first months of the pandemic were deleted from a world database wont to track the evolution of the virus.
The report was authored by Jesse Bloom, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer research facility in Seattle.
Critics reiterated that the deletion of the info from the international database shows China's further plan to cover the origin of Covid-19. "Why would scientists ask international databases to delete key data that informs us about how Covid-19 began in Wuhan?" asked Alina Chan, a researcher with Harvard's Broad Institute, on Twitter. "That's the question you'll account yourselves," Chan added.
The first official case of Covid-19 in China was recorded to possess occurred in December 2019 and was linked to Wuhan's Huanan seafood market. However, some early cases had shown no known reference to Huanan, implying that the virus was already circulating before it reached the market.
The data within the report by Bloom showed that samples taken from the seafood market were " not representative" of SARS-CoV-2 as an entire and were a variant of the progenitor sequence that was in circulation earlier and spread to other parts of China.
Moreover, a joint study published by China and therefore the World Health Organization (WHO) in March-end also acknowledged that there could are sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak in December 2019.
