China has angrily rejected findings by scientists at Harvard University that coronavirus started circulating in the city of Wuhan at the end of last summer — months earlier than Chinese authorities have admitted.
The researchers from Harvard and Boston universities came to that conclusion after analysing satellite images of hospital car parks in Wuhan, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, and queries on China’s Baidu search engine about disease symptoms such as a cough and diarrhoea.
“We observe an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume beginning in late summer and early fall 2019,” the scientists wrote in a paper released online but not peer-reviewed.