Is this proof China was in grip of Covid MONTHS before it told the world?

Two satellite shots of a hospital car park in the epicentre of China’s corona crisis, one year apart – and in last October’s, double the traffic... just one of the tell-tale global indicators with damning implications for China’s honesty

LOOK at the satellite images on this page. One shows a hospital car park in the city of Wuhan, China. It was taken in October 2018. The other shows the same location almost exactly a year later, in October 2019.

Now spot the difference. That is what a team of researchers from Harvard and Boston Universities are doing. They have so far pored over 111 images of medical facilities in the place where the coronavirus pandemic began — and those pictures appear to reveal a trend.

Namely that, from August last year, something was making those medical facilities much busier than normal.

This exercise in ‘digital epidemiology’ was published this week, adding to suspicions that the virus was making people ill far earlier than previously thought.

Officially, China first reported a cluster of cases on New Year’s Eve. It later told the World Health Organisation that the earliest symptoms for those patients dated back to December 8.

The disease began to spread overseas in mid-January, according to news reports, with cases recorded in the US on the 21st, France on the 24th and Italy on the 31st.

That was also the day two Chinese nationals tested positive in York, making them the first confirmed cases in the UK (although they caught Covid-19 overseas).

The first confirmed Irish case was identified on February 29 in a teenager who had become ill after returning from a school trip to Italy on Saturday, February 29.

The second case was then confirmed on March 3 after a woman who had recently travelled from Italy tested positive.

Yet there are growing claims — not limited to the satellite study — that the coronavirus may have been in circulation far earlier. And scientists in other countries are turning up growing evidence that Covid-19 appeared on their shores earlier than thought, too...

A SUMMER ‘SPIKE’ IN WUHAN

THE ‘digital epidemiologists’ from Harvard and Boston identified an apparent surge in vehicle traffic outside hospitals in the Chinese city that started to become apparent in late August last year.

The traffic spike appears to have gathered pace as the year went on. For example, researchers counted 171 cars parked at Wuhan’s Tianyou Hospital one day in October 2018. On the same day in 2019 there were 285, a rise of 67%.

Things peaked in mid-December, when the local outbreak was at its height, the researchers say. And the growing congestion in hospital car parks in this period coincided with a marked rise in the number of local internet users using search engine Baidu to look up the terms ‘cough’ and ‘diarrhoea’.

In a study published this week, the U.S. team argue that their findings ‘corroborate the hypothesis that the virus emerged naturally in southern China and was potentially already circulating at the time of the Wuhan cluster’ that became public around Christmas.

‘Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic,’ said author Dr John Brownstein.

Not everyone agrees, however. The study has not been peerreviewed and, although the team was able to study 111 satellite images, it was impossible to make comparisons on some days because of cloud cover.

Critics also believe the type of medical facilities depicted in some images may undermine this thesis, as several were children’s hospitals. As Keith Neal, emeritus professor of infectious diseases at Nottingham University, points out: ‘Youngsters simply aren’t hospitalised that much by the virus.’

But a growing pandemic would be likely to displace patients from elsewhere, increasing strain on all parts of the medical system.

The Chinese Foreign Office has nonetheless declared the study ‘full of deficiencies’ and ‘grossly fabricated’ as part of a U.S. plot to ‘create and deliberately disseminate disinformation against China.’

ATHLETES KEELING OVER IN OCTOBER

ABOUT 10,000 athletes from more than 100 countries descended on Wuhan for nine days last autumn to compete at the Military World Games, a sort of Olympics for serving soldiers. After the pandemic struck, months later, many of them recalled how they had fallen ill during the event in October, suffering flu-like symptoms similar to those of Covid-19.

The Spanish Ministry of Defence has revealed that at least four of its delegation had become quite seriously ill in Wuhan. One of them told El Mundo newspaper: ‘The authorities just took it as a sore throat or flu infection and treated us as if we were already cured.’

Some members of the French team then made similar reports.

Elodie Clouvel, a world champion modern pentathlete, said in a TV interview: ‘We were in Wuhan at the end of October and afterwards we all fell ill. Valentin [Belaud, her partner, also a pentathlete] missed three days of training. I was sick too... I think we have already had the coronavirus.’

German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock recalled: ‘Some athletes from my team fell ill. I got sick in the last two days. I have never felt so sick — either it was a very bad cold or Covid-19.’

And an Italian fencer, Matteo Tagliariol, gave an interview in which he claimed all six occupants of his official apartment in the city fell ill with symptoms ‘that looked like those’ of the virus.

Catching something that ‘looks like’ Covid-19 isn’t the same as actually contracting it, of course. And six weeks after the athletes first made their claims, none appears to have tested positive for antibodies you would expect to find in a genuine survivor.

CASES ‘CONFIRMED’ AFTER SINGLES DAY

CHINA’S authorities went public about the crisis on New Year’s Eve and insist the earliest recorded case dates from December 8.

But secret government data leaked to the South China Morning

Post in Hong Kong suggests the outbreak began almost a month earlier.

Documents seen by the newspaper suggest the first confirmed case can be traced back to November 17, less than a week after ‘Singles Day’, a public holiday when young men and women traditionally go out in search of a partner.

‘A 55-year-old from Hubei province (the region that contains Wuhan) could have been the first person to have contracted Covid,’ the newspaper reported in March.

‘From that date onwards, one to five new cases were reported each day. By December 15, the total number of infections stood at 27. The first double-digit daily rise was reported on December 17 and by December 20, the total number of confirmed cases had reached 60.’

At least 266 people were infected by the end of December, said the report, which stressed that of the first nine cases identified in November — four men and five women, aged between 39 and 79 — none has been confirmed as being ‘patient zero’. So it is possible that other so-far-unidentified cases date back even farther.

Even if this is true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a November outbreak was covered up. Although the disease may have been doing the rounds at that time, whistleblowers in the Chinese medical community say doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in mid-December.

SUSPICIOUS FRENCH X-RAYS

FRENCH scientists, on the hunt for their country’s so-called ‘patient zero’, have found evidence that the coronavirus may have arrived in Europe around the time it started to spread in Hubei.

Dr Michel Schmitt, from Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Colmar, leads a team of researchers examining thousands of chest X-rays