The Wall Street Journal reported on September 19 that members of the World health Organization’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR), which traveled to Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, to investigate the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak, have recently reported scientific evidence of as many as 13 different genetic sequences of the virus infecting the 174 confirmed cases in Wuhan since December 2019, according to Chinese sources. Based on scientific evidence from China at the Time that as many as 13 different genetic sequences of the virus were present in the 174 confirmed cases in Wuhan since December 2009, it was confirmed that the local outbreak may have spread quietly before the official claim of an outbreak in December of that year, at least in November and as far back as September.
IPPR experts tried to obtain blood samples in Wuhan from several months before December 19 for antibody testing and from thousands of people who were unwell during that period to see how far the virus had actually spread before the first case claimed by China showed symptoms on December 1 and was diagnosed on December 8. However, the Chinese side was reluctant to release the original data on the 174 cases mentioned above, and refused to provide other earlier possible cases, and only pulled information on 92 patients with similar symptoms of pneumonia in Wuhan from October to December of that year from 233 medical institutions in Hubei.
However, IPPR experts found no connection between many of the 174 cases provided by the Chinese side and the South China Seafood and Fishery Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which the Chinese government initially identified as the source of the outbreak. IPPR’s Dutch virologist Gubermans concluded that the above divergence may have occurred between mid-November and early December of 1919, and that people may have been infected in September.
According to Gubermans, the evidence suggests that the virus began to enter the human transmission phase around mid-November, but that there were not many cases at that time to cause concern until December, when it spread from both the above-mentioned market-related and unrelated sources, resulting in an instant outbreak in Wuhan.
IPPR believes that the Wuhan case spread quietly before the December 19 outbreak, which coincides with the experience of small-scale fevers in New York City and northern Italy in the United States a few weeks before the outbreak. A new study by the University of Arizona and the University of California, San Diego, suggests that people in Hubei province should have been hit by the disease in mid-October of that year, but less than 20 people were infected by the end of November, but the virus mutated between mid-November and mid-December, causing the number of infections to double at a rate of four to five days in December.
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