LONDON, June 10 — Beijing 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...
Wednesday, 10 Jun 2020 09:49 AM MYT
The research, which has not been peer-reviewed by other scientists, used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan — where the disease was first identified in late 2019 — and data for symptom-related queries on search engines for things such as “cough” and “diarrhoea”. Paul Digard, an expert in virology at the University of Edinburgh, said that using search engine data and satellite imagery of hospital traffic to detect disease outbreaks “is an interesting idea with some validity.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, asked about the research at a news briefing yesterday, said: “I think it is ridiculous, incredibly ridiculous, to come up with this conclusion based on superficial observations such as traffic volume.” 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.
Dr Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said the research method is not validated and is “very indirect and imprecise.”
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