Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier - likely started Fall 2019

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Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers

ABC News

Dramatic spikes in auto traffic around major hospitals in Wuhan last fall suggest the novel coronavirus may have been present and spreading through central China long before the outbreak was first reported to the world, according to a new Harvard Medical School study.

Using techniques similar to those employed by intelligence agencies, the research team behind the study analyzed commercial satellite imagery and "observed a dramatic increase in hospital traffic outside five major Wuhan hospitals beginning late summer and early fall 2019," according to Dr. John Brownstein, the Harvard Medical professor who led the research.

Brownstein, an ABC News contributor, said the traffic increase also "coincided with" elevated queries on a Chinese internet search for "certain symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus."

Though Brownstein acknowledged the evidence is circumstantial, he said the study makes for an important new data point in the mystery of COVID-19's origins.

“Something was happening in October,” said Brownstein, the chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and director of the medical center’s Computational Epidemiology Lab. “Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.”

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Since the outbreak in China last year, the coronavirus has swept across the globe infecting nearly 7 million and killing more than 400,000 worldwide, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. It is believed that the virus jumped from animal species, where it had little effect, to humans, where it has become the most potent natural killer since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

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China didn't tell the world that human to human transmission was occurring until after hundreds of thousands of tourists would disperse across the globe following the Chinese new years celebrations in late January.....giving the Chinese government enough time to hoard PPE and in some cases import PPE from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Canada, and the USA. Months later, those countries would have massive outbreaks of their own and face PPE shortages.

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Starting with nearly 350 images captured by private satellites circling the globe, Brownstein’s study first examined traffic and parking outside major hospitals in Wuhan for the past two years. Among them were photographs snapped from space approximately every week or every other week through the fall of 2019. From the approximately 350 frames, researchers found 108 usable images, showing locations without obstruction from smog, tall buildings, clouds or other features that could complicate satellite analysis.

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Brownstein said he and his researchers found the hospital-traffic data to be even more compelling after digging into internet search patterns. Around the time the hospital traffic was surging, there was a spike in online traffic in the Wuhan region among users asking China’s Baidu search engine for information on “cough” and “diarrhea.”

“While queries of the respiratory symptom ‘cough’ show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, ‘diarrhea’ is a more COVID-19-specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic,” according to the study. “The increase of both signals precede the documented start of the COVID-19 pandemic in December.”

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It's sad that China is so dishonest that the global business community has to rely on satellite images to gauge everything from factory activity to truck traffic just to attempt to validate their bullshite accounting documents.

But now we have to do it to understand and predict pandemics because their government is so completely dishonest.

Here are the satellite images (some of them at least) in the linked article.



TLDR: China's dishonesty masked Coronavirus from researchers outside of their borders for months. There's now evidence of a spike in health care activity in the fall of 2019, with internet searches in China for things that happen to be symptoms of Covid-19 also spiking in the fall of last year

Had China been more open and honest, a lot of the human suffering and global economic upheaval could have been avoided.