It was in late 2019 that the first official case of coronavirus infection was reported in Wuhan, China. The infection soon spread like wildfire, and it quickly emerged as a global pandemic, wreaking havoc in almost all nations. According to the latest statistics, nearly five million people have already succumbed to the pandemic. And now, a new study has suggested that the Chinese province that was the initial epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak had made significant purchases of equipment months before Beijing intimated the World Health Organization (WHO) that a new infectious disease has started spreading.
Mysterious purchase of PCR testing equipment
According to the study carried out by Australian-American firm Internet 2.0, the province's purchase of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, testing equipment, which allows scientists to amplify DNA samples to screen for infectious illness had dramatically increased in 2019, which suggests that the pandemic already had its outbreak in China before the Asian giant informed WHO.
It was on December 30, 2019, that the World Health Organization's China Country Office received a notification stating that instances of pneumonia have been discovered among people infected with a virus. Later, on January 07, 2020, Chinese officials revealed that a new strain of coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 was behind the illness.
The Covid origin mystery
Ever since the outbreak, several medical experts, the United States, and its allies had accused Beijing of having a role in the pandemic. The mystery deepened as China did not allow for a full-fledged probe to track down the origin of the pandemic. Now, several people strongly believe that the pandemic might have escaped from a Wuhan biosecurity facility.
A few days back, Ian Lipkin, a professor at Columbia University honored by China for work on the first Sars epidemic earlier this century has claimed to have heard about the pandemic outbreak in Wuhan more than two weeks before it was disclosed to global health bodies.
Chinese virologist Dr Le-Meng Yan had also once claimed that the Covid pandemic was leaked by China as a bioweapon. Yan also added that China has been repeatedly denying the allegations surrounding laboratory lab leak theory and is using misinformation to mislead the world.
