First virus case could have emerged in China in Oct 2019 - study

June 25, 2021 / 10:04 AM

Sharjah24 – Reuters: The virus that causes COVID-19 could have started spreading in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the central city of Wuhan, a new study showed on Friday.

Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.

The most likely date for the virus's emergence was Nov. 17, 2019, and it had probably already spread globally by January 2020, they estimated.

China's first official COVID-19 case was in December 2019 and was linked to Wuhan's Huanan seafood market.

However, some early cases had no known connection with Huanan, implying that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating before it reached the market.

A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.

In a paper released in preprint form this week, Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle recovered deleted sequencing data from early COVID-19 cases in China.