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Uhane in late summer and early fall experienced a significant increase in the number of cars in hospital parking lots compared to the same period last year, as well as the popularity of infectious keyword searches on the search site. China’s most popular Internet, Baidu.
According to the researchers, it all started in August 2019 and ended in December 2019. This conclusion was made in a pre-publication published on the Harvard server by a team of researchers led by John Brownstein, chief innovation researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Looking at satellite images from October 2018, the researchers counted 171 cars at one of Wuhan’s largest hospitals, the Tianyou site. A year later, 285 cars were recorded in satellite photos in the same parking lot, which is 67 percent. more, and traffic over the same period near other Wuhan hospitals, researchers say, has increased by as much as 90 percent.
Other hospitals see increased traffic both in the early fall and winter. And in September and October 2019, not only was there an increase in traffic to hospitals, but keywords like “diarrhea” or “cough” became increasingly popular in Internet searches, the researchers say.
“These data are really very convincing, because we have noticed that during the period mentioned, there has been a significant increase in the number of people in Uhan seeking information on diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, more specifically diarrhea. We have never seen such a sharp increase in searches historically.
And now we know that gastrointestinal symptoms are a really important factor in coronavirus. A large proportion of people living in Wuhan who tested positive for coronavirus also experienced symptoms of diarrhea.
The use of “validated data streams” to monitor respiratory diseases is not new. It is also a tactic used by intelligence agencies.
“The increase in traffic intensity in larger hospitals may be a relative indicator that something is happening in the population. We did a similar study with Latin America a few years ago, when we noticed a significant increase in traffic to hospitals during the flu season. This is exactly the idea for this study.
Well, of course, we can’t exactly associate these indicators with the appearance of the coronavirus, but they contribute, in a sense, to the growing evidence that something was happening in Wuhan long before it was officially recognized. “Our study also confirms the hypothesis that the virus naturally developed in southeast China and that it may have already spread before the first officially market-related case in Wuhan,” said John Brownstein.
He said that it is not easy to detect the first signs of a future pandemic.
“If the same thing had happened in the United States, we might not have noticed it ourselves.” Therefore, it is very important not only to strengthen our medical system, but also to improve medical surveillance, ”says Brownstein.
So far, it is officially claimed that the COVID-19 disease began to spread in 2019. in December in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, China. 2020 An epidemic of the disease broke out in China in January, and the infection then spread to other parts of the world. The causative agent of COVID-19 is the previously unknown SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
More than 7 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with coronavirus, more than 400,000 have died from the disease, and more than 3.5 million have recovered. people.
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