A rise in road traffic outside Wuhan hospitals at the end of last summer – linked with growth in internet searches for coronavirus-like symptoms indicates that Covid-19 could have struck China before autumn. This is distant earlier than has been assumed before.
A study led by Dr. John Brownstein, from Harvard Medical School interpreted commercial satellite imagery.
A dramatic increase was observed by his team in the traffic in front of the five major hospitals of Wuhan at the beginning of late summer and early fall 2019.
According to him a graph of the data shows that the number of cars began to increase in August and was at its peak in December before the lockdown was introduced.
The Officials in China did not formally communicate with the World Health Organization until 31st December about the respiratory pathogen that was spreading through Wuhan.
Brownstein and his team observed the number of cars in front of the hospitals across 108 probate satellites. The number was so huge that it can easily be identified that something was going wrong in the community.
According to his analysis of data, he informed that the number of cars parked at Wuhan’s Tianyou Hospital was 285 on 10 October 2019 which is 67 percent more than the 171 recorded that same day a year earlier.