Harvard study ‘full of flaws’

▶ GT research refutes top medical school’s paper

Chinese doctors and scientists have pointed out the many flaws of a Harvard Medical School study that used satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan to conclude that the coronavirus may have emerged as early as autumn last year. They believe the flawed paper, which has not even been peer reviewed, is yet another poorly organized attempt of the US to throw mud at China’s hardwon battle against the virus.

They rebuked the points of the paper, saying they didn’t experience a surge of cars parked in the hospital parking lot or patients with COVID-19 symptoms in Wuhan last autumn as the paper claims. Chinese experts also said the satellite images, which support the whole paper, was deliberately taken from different angles to highlight the sharp contrasts.

The fact that such a preposterous paper was published by the world-renowned Harvard University has stunned the Chinese public, with many netizens and experts saying the university’s kowtowing to the US political conspiracy against China is a destruction of its time-honored fame in China and will obscure its reputation among Chinese students.

Baseless claim

Researchers from Harvard and Boston universities came to the conclusion after analyzing satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan, and queries in China’s Baidu search engine about symptoms such as coughing and diarrhea.

“We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late summer and early fall 2019,” Elaine Okanyene Nsoesie from Boston University, together with John Samuel Brownstein, professor of

Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and several other researchers, wrote in a paper released online but was not peer-reviewed.

The Harvard scientists extracted data for Wuhan hospital parking volumes between January 2018 and April 2020 and found a steep increase in traffic that began in August 2019 and peaked in December.

Three doctors from Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital and Wuhan Tongji Hospital, which were cited in the Harvard paper, all rejected the paper’s claim that they received more patients with fever or diarrhea symptoms than usual last autumn.

“This is totally inconsistent with the facts. If what the paper said was true, that the virus was circulating earlier, the outbreak would also have emerged earlier given the virus’ highly contagious nature,” Peng Zhiyong, the director of the intensive care unit of the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, told the Global Times.

Those doctors also denied there had been a sudden surge in traffic around the hospitals.

Comparing those satellite images, the number difference in the 2018 and 2019 pictures is only a few hundred. Chinese netizens questioned if a difference of a few hundred vehicles meant anything in a city with 10 million residents.

Wuhan authorities said the number of motor vehicles in the city was 3.2 million as of

March 2019, an increase of 278,000 compared to that in 2018.

Analyzing satellite pictures taken in 2018 and 2019, satellite experts told the Global Times that some of those pictures were not taken from the same angle. Take the ones taken at Zhongnan Hospital as an example.

Fewer vehicles can be seen on the 2018 photo because it was obviously taken from an angle of inclination. Thus, many cars were blocked by buildings and couldn’t be seen in this picture, while the 2019 picture was taken from a vertical angle, which gives viewers a clearer view of vehicles.

An anonymous expert told the Global Times that the satellite picture was taken by RS Metrics, who used a satellite system which transits China around 10am, while a 2018 picture of Wuhan’s Tongji Hospital suggest it was taken by Worldview-1 satellite, whose transit time is around 1pm.

As for searches for coughing and diarrhea on Baidu, a Global Times reporter logged into Baidu’s search tracing system and found no obvious changes in searches of those keywords compared with the same period in the last two years.

Tracing back the search of “cough” and “diarrhea” in the Baidu system dating back to June 2017, there was a steeper upward curve of searches of those two words in September to November 2017 and 2018 than the same period in 2019.

Brownstein did not reply to the Global Times as of press time.

Mounting accusations

But as soon as the Harvard paper was published, it was used as ammunition by certain Western politicians, such as US President Donald Trump, to attack China. Soon, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, a key anti-government figure in Hong Kong and founder of Apple Daily, weighed in as well.

The paper was snubbed by academicians as not solid and cannot stand scrutiny.

Keith Neal, emeritus professor of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, pointed out to the Reuters that one of the two hospitals in the study was the Children’s hospital of Wuhan. But relatively few children have been hospitalized with COVID-19. “The comment that children’s hospitals were affected… suggests this probably was not COVID-19,” he said.

Public discontent simmered over the publication, with many China’s net users accusing Harvard of damaging its time-honored reputation.

One net user said: “Since when have satellite pictures of vehicles and search results can be used to support for studies about viruses? I guess now we can count on the day when we consult on search engines to cure diseases for us.”