A researcher from China has entered the sequence of the Covid-19 coronavirus into the database of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) The United States in December 2019, 2 weeks before Beijing officially notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the virus. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal. From the documents of the US Department of Health received by the House of Representatives committee, it follows that on December 28, a Chinese researcher from Beijing, Lily Ren, uploaded an almost complete sequence of the virus structure into the database of the American government. Chinese officials at the time were still publicly describing the outbreak in Wuhan as viral pneumonia of "unknown origin" and had not yet closed the Huanan Seafood Market, the site of one of the first Covid-19 outbreaks. As the newspaper notes, the two-week gap in the WHO notification "seems to confirm claims that Beijing was hiding key information about the coronavirus." The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published a sequence "almost identical" to the one presented by Ren on January 10, 2020. Researchers from the University of Kent previously concluded that the first case of coronavirus infection probably occurred in China between early October and mid-November 2019, a few weeks before the first official covid patient was registered in Wuhan. Scientists named November 17, 2019 as the most likely date of the first infection. The first official case of COVID-19 in China was reported in December 2019 and was associated with the seafood market. However, the cases that occurred before this are not related to the market, according to British scientists. In a joint study by WHO and China, the transmission of coronavirus from bats to humans through another animal is called the "most likely scenario." Scientists considered the direct transfer of the virus from bats to humans to be a less likely option, and the spread through products to be "possible, but unlikely." The scientists also concluded that a virus leak from the laboratory is "extremely unlikely."
"An epidemic (from Greek, literally "to the people") is a continuous process of homogeneous infectious diseases following each other (an epidemic process), expressed in their significant spread in a community, locality, district, country. Depending on the greater or lesser number of cases of diseases, different degrees of intensity of the epidemic process are noted: 1) sporadic morbidity – single infectious diseases that occur in a locality without a visible epidemiological connection with each other (for example, in periods exceeding the incubation period of this disease); 2) epidemic outbreak – group diseases in a limited area (collective, locality, district) associated with a common source of infection; 3) epidemic – a significant excess of the incidence of this infectious disease in an area, region, etc.; 4) pandemic (from Greek, literally "all the people") is a strong epidemic, sharply exceeding in intensity the usual epidemic, spreading among the population in large territories, sometimes entire countries and even the whole world. However, the assessment of the intensity of the epidemic process depends not only on the number of cases, it is also related to the type of disease: for example, dozens of diseases in a locality with influenza are considered sporadic, and the appearance of even isolated cases of smallpox in the same locality is considered an epidemic.