healthUpdated: Jun 10, 2020 13:54 ISTBeijing dismissed as “ridiculous” a Harvard Medical School study of hospital traffic and search engine data that suggested the new coronavirus may already have been spreading in China last August, and scientists said it offered no convincing evidence of when the outbreak began. The study’s authors said increased hospital traffic and symptom search data in Wuhan preceded the documented start of the coronavirus pandemic in December 2019. “In August, we identify a unique increase in searches for diarrhoea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data,” it said. Neal said the study included traffic around at least one children’s hospital and that while children do get ill with flu, they do not tend to get sick with COVID-19. He and others pointed to genetic evidence suggesting the virus made the leap from animal host to humans some time in the fall.

Source: Hindustan Times June 10, 2020 07:41 UTC