Study: First COVID Case Likely Appeared In China Before Documented

The first case of COVID-19 in China likely appeared weeks before it was documented, according to a study from University of Kent researchers in Britain.

The study estimated that the virus first came about in China on about Nov. 17, 2019, and had spread around the world by January 2020. Per ScienceAlert.com, the Kent researchers used a mathematical model from conservation science that's usually utilized to determine when a species might become extinct.

The first official case of COVID was linked to a wild animal market in the Chinese city of Wuhan --though there is an increasing belief that the pandemic may have started via a leak in a virology lab located in the same city. Some of the earliest cases in Wuhan, it is believed, had no known link to the wild animal market.

As Fox News and Reuters relayed, earlier this week, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle "released a paper in which it recovered sequencing data from early Wuhan cases that showed the cases linked to the animal market were a variant of the original virus that had already spread to other parts of the country."

Chia has been widely suspected of attempting to cover up how the virus actually spread, especially when the virus first emerged. "Beijing has also been accused of not allowing full and transparent international inventions of the virus' origins to take place," Fox wrote.