China hid COVID-19 details weeks before it became pandemic, US documents show

Chinese researchers mapped the virus that causes COVID-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before the World Health Organization downplayed the danger posed by the contagion virus that snowballed into a pandemic shortly after. According to a probe by the US congressional investigators, the Chinese researchers isolated the virus on December 28, 2019.

The documents describing a new timeline were obtained by US House Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The findings imply that China knew of the pandemic during the crucial early days of the virus when it was potentially still limited to certain pockets in China. Days later, as people moved across China to celebrate the New Year, the virus spread. 

Consequently, the virus spread across the world and became the most devastating global health threat in the twenty-first century so far.

The extra two weeks could have been crucial in helping the global medical community to ascertain the danger posed by COVID-19. 

Scientists worldwide in the early days of the mysterious disease spread were racing to understand the disease that came to be named COVID-19. It killed millions across the world, infected tens of millions and pushed the global economy into turmoil. 

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, a Chinese researcher in Beijing submitted a nearly complete sequence of the structure of the virus to a US government-run database on December 28, 2019. 

The sequence was never published and was deleted from the database on Jan. 16, 2020, after the US National Institute of Health, following its protocols, asked the Chinese researcher for more technical details and she didn’t respond.

On Jan 12, NIH received and published a SARS-CoV-2 sequence from another source.

China shared the sequence of the Covid virus with the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020, according to the US government. 

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When the Chinese scientist submitted the Covid sequence, the officials in Wuhan were still describing the viral outbreak as pneumonia of “unknown cause”. The Chinese had not even closed down the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, the site of one of the initial Covid outbreaks.

The Chinese scientist who submitted the virus sequence to a US database was a researcher at the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. 

The latest information does not clarify if or not Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak but it suggests that the world still does not exactly have a full understanding of the pandemic’s origin.