The Chinese government has slammed a new report which suggests it knew about COVID-19 long before November 2019.
China formally notified the World Health Organization of a mysterious new disease circulating in the province Hubei on December 31. It was publicly identified as a coronavirus a week later.
Current understanding is the outbreak began in November 2019 in Hubei's capital Wuhan, the first likely hospital case recorded on November 17. There have been a few claims the virus was circulating well before then not just in China, but as far away as Spain, but none have been widely accepted amongst the scientific community.
This week an Australian-US cybersecurity company called Internet 2.0 released a report which claims the Chinese government dramatically ramped up procurement of polymerase chain reaction testing equipment. You might know them as PCR tests, the kind used to detect pathogens - including SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes COVID-19.
"We started with the view that we would look at what China said, and then look at what the government was actually doing because some things are a little bit harder to hide," Internet 2.0 co-founder Robert Potter told Bloomberg in a broadcast interview.
"You can make announcements, you can write op-eds, but at the end of the day… China's procurement records are reasonably robust and reasonably open source."
"Significant and abnormal" purchases of PCR equipment, compared to previous years, were made in May 2019 by a military hospital in Wuhan - at the epicentre of the November/December outbreak, the Hubei Province Districts Centres for Disease Control and Prevention between May and December, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology in October and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November.
China's spending on PCR equipment had been trending upwards since 2012, the report shows, but spikes massively in 2019 - most of the new spending in disease control centres, universities and in animal testing facilities (it's believed the virus jumped to humans from bats, perhaps via an intermediary animal such as a pangolin).
"We believe the increased spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible infection," the report, available on Internet 2.0's website, says.
China's Foreign Ministry rejected the report, calling its conclusions dubious.
"Virus traceability is a serious scientific issue that should be addressed by scientists… China's anti-epidemic campaign is open to the world, the situation is clear, the facts are clear at a glance, and stand the test of time and history."
Experts said the paper suggested a sudden need for PCR equipment, but it was only speculation that it was becuase of COVID-19 - one noting China was battling an outbreak of African swine fever in 2019, which would explain a rise in procurement from animal testing facilities; while another said PCR sales have been going up for years as the "methodology of choice for pathogen detection".
Potter said while it's not a smoking gun, it could help future probes into the origins of the pandemic, which has killed several million people in the past two years.
"They haven't pushed back on the facts of any of the procurement records that we've put forward. They challenged our interpretation of the data...
"There's a lot missing. I think there's too much for it all to be hidden forever… but what we can see here is a way to move forward. We wrote this report on a very specific item of procurement - there are dozens of other items of procurement we encourage other researchers to look at that would be a way of testing the same hypothesis."
The World Health Organization conducted a probe into the virus' origins earlier this year, but said a second phase of investigation was needed - but China has so far refused to cooperate.