New evidence suggests that COVID-19 may have been spreading in Germany as early as 2019, casting doubt on China's COVID-19 timeline. China did not alert the world about the virus until New Year's Eve of that year, but experts have since found evidence that COVID-19 was already present in Europe before this alarm was raised.
A medical report unearthed by MailOnline has further discredited China's claims, adding to a growing body of research that suggests the virus was circulating months before China acknowledged it. The new evidence is likely to fuel continued criticism of China's handling of the pandemic, particularly in terms of its initial response and communication with the international community.
Case Study on the German Patient With COVID-19 Symptoms in 2019
Doctors at Charité-Universitätsmedizin in Berlin suspect that a 71-year-old man admitted to the hospital with pneumonia of an unknown cause on December 30, 2019, was one of Germany's earliest cases of COVID-19.
Doctors wrote in the paper, titled "Chest Computed Tomography Findings Typical of COVID-19 Pneumonia in Germany as Early as 30 December 2019: A Case Report" published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, that the man had not traveled overseas. However, CT scans of his lungs showed a pattern of damage typical of SARS-CoV-2.
He was put on a ventilator four days after admission and spent a total of five days on it. He was discharged from the hospital on January 28, one day after the first officially confirmed Covid-19 case was announced in Germany.
His case suggests that COVID-19 was already spreading in the European country in December 2019, even before the first confirmed case was reported. Medics from Charité-Universitätsmedizin reviewed the case armed with the knowledge of tell-tale signs of COVID-19, which might have been overlooked at the time.
The man had not been identified in the report, and medics did not state the cause of death, but it was reported that he died in April 2020. The findings also suggest that there may be other cases that have not been identified. Understanding the earliest cases of the disease is important in tracking its spread, and it may help in determining how the virus originated and how it was transmitted.
Fresh Evidence Casts Doubt on China's COVID-19 Timeline
As per MailOnline, the authors of the new case report believe that COVID-19 may have been present in other European countries, like the UK, months before the first official cases were detected.
According to the report, a 61-year-old man in the UK was found to have COVID-19 antibodies in blood samples taken in November 2019, almost three months before the first official cases in the country. The authors of the report say the case adds to the growing body of evidence, suggesting that the virus was spreading in several European countries in late 2019.
Furthermore, other studies have also indicated that COVID-19 was present in Italy and France months before their first official cases. This includes the virus being detected in wastewater samples in Italy in December 2019, almost two months before the first official COVID-19 diagnosis in the country.
Samples collected from patients in France in December 2019 have also come back positive for the virus, a month before the first official cases were spotted. Despite these studies, China has insisted that the virus only originated in mid-December, weeks before they notified the world about the pandemic as more cases came to light.
Today, the debate continues when exactly COVID-19 emerged and where it originated. Some scientists believe it came from an unconfirmed animal source, possibly bats, before jumping to another species held at a wet market in Wuhan and then onto people.
Others have suggested the virus leaked from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology as a result of coronavirus research being conducted there.
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