Covid, Wsj: 'China mapped the virus two weeks before announcing it'

Chinese researchers isolated and mapped Covid-19 at the end of December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed the details of the deadly virus to the world: this was exclusively revealed by the Wall Street Journal, after reviewing documents the US Department of Health obtained from a House committee. According to the Wsj, a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded an almost complete sequence of the Covid structure to a database maintained by the US government on 28 December 2019, while China did not share the virus sequence with the World Health Organisation (WHO) until 11 January 2020.

When the researcher, Lili Ren of the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, had already mapped the virus, Chinese officials were still publicly describing the outbreak in Wuhan as a viral pneumonia 'of unknown cause' and had yet to close the local wholesale market for live animals, site of one of the first Covid-19 outbreaks. The new information, the US newspaper points out, does not shed light on the debate over whether the coronavirus emerged from an infected animal or a laboratory leak, but suggests that the world still does not have a complete explanation of the origin of the pandemic.

The extra two weeks could, however, have proved crucial in helping the international medical community to identify how Covid-19 spreads, develop medical defences, and initiate a possible vaccine, according to specialists. By the end of 2019, scientists and governments around the world were racing to understand the mysterious disease they would later name Covid-19 and which would kill millions.