The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on January 17 (local time) that “China completed its sequence analysis of new coronavirus infections at the end of 2019, yet finally released it to the entire world after two weeks.”
According to documents obtained by the U.S. House of Representatives from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on December 28, 2019, researchers at a laboratory in Beijing completed a fairly complete nucleotide sequence analysis on the new coronas and gave it to a database run by the U.S. government.
This data shows that at least around December 28, 2019, scientists inside China knew about the new corona,” said Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA.
The researcher who generated the data was Dr. Ren Lili, who was affiliated with the Beijing Institute of Virus Biology. The institute is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, which is under the Chinese government.
Dr. Ren reportedly took samples and extracted sequences from five patients at a hospital in Wuhan, China, between December 18 and December 29, 2019.
Nevertheless, Chinese authorities did not offer a positive explanation for the outbreak of a string of patients on January 9, 2020, announcing that it was “viral pneumonia of unknown cause.” They also did not close the wholesale seafood market in the South China region, one of the initial disease outbreak sites of the new coronas.
China then shared the virus sequence with the World Health Organization (WHO) only on January 11, 2020, and the WSJ reported that “China in particular shared it with the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on January 5, earlier than this, but did not inform scientists worldwide.
Experts noted that “if China had shared information about the new corona with the international community two weeks earlier, it would have ensured prime time for the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases.
Copyrights(C) Herald wowkorea.jp 96
