Covid spreading in China since last August: Study

BEIJING/LONDON: Beijing dismissed as “ridiculous” a Harvard Medical School study of hospital traffic and search engine data that suggested the coronavirus may have been spreading in China since last August.

The research, which has not been peer-reviewed by other scientists, used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan where the disease was first identified in late 2019 - and data for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

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, “It is... incredibly ridiculous to come up with this conclusion based on superficial observations such as traffic volume.”

The Harvard research, which was posted online as a so-called preprint, showed a steep increase in hospital car park occupancy in August 2019.

“In August, we identify a unique increase in searches for diarrhoea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data,” it said.

“It’s an interesting piece of work, but I’m not sure it takes us much further forward,” said Keith Neal, a professor of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at Britain’s Nottingham University.

COMPULSORY TESTING FOR EIGHT CATEGORIES

China’s national health commission (NHC) has announced that from now on all across the country, eight categories of people would have to be mandatorily tested for Covid-19 to prevent a resurgence of the respiratory disease.

Meanwhile, mass testing on more than 7,84,000 people in Mudanjiang city close to the Russian and North Korean borders has revealed 19 asymptomatic carriers.