Covid could have spread to Germany in 2019, according to new evidence that casts further doubts about the timeline of China’s origin.
Beijing did not alert the world about the mysterious virus circulating in Wuhan – the city at the epicenter of the epidemic – until New Year’s Eve 2019.
However, the catalog of studies poked holes in claims that Xi Jinping’s regime blew the whistle as soon as it realized a new disease was spreading. Experts detected numerous signs that Covid was already in Europe before alarm bells rang.
MailOnline has now exposed a fascinating medical report that distorts the official Chinese version of events.
Doctors in Berlin treated a 71-year-old man who had what they now suspect was Covid, exactly one day before news broke that a group of Chinese patients had contracted a SARS-like virus.
Do CT scans of the lungs of a 71-year-old German man taken on December 30, 2019 prove that Covid was circulating in the country one month before the first official case?
The German case occurred a day before China officially notified the world about the Covid virus, but some reports said that Beijing officials knew about the virus as early as November. A file photo of paramedics at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in January 2020
Medics from the Charité-Universitätsmedizin have now re-examined his condition armed with knowledge of tell-tale signs of Covid that may have been hidden at the time.
They wanted to know if the virus was circulating before Germany’s first official case was recorded in January.
The man, who has not been identified, was hospitalized with pneumonia of unknown cause on December 30, 2019.
He was in “bad” condition, with elevated heart rate and blood pressure and fever.
Paramedics indicated that he was overweight, smoked, and had previously suffered a stroke.
But, crucially, he hasn’t been abroad recently, the doctors wrote in Journal of Medical Case Reports.
CT scans of his lungs indicated a possible viral infection of unknown origin, with negative results for pathogens capable of causing pneumonia.
But those scans show a pattern of damage now familiar to millions of doctors around the world, the ‘crazy paving’ in his lungs typical of Covid.
The authors wrote: ‘Given the results of a chest computed tomography (CT) scan, it is likely that our patient was one of the first cases of Covid in Germany.
This case indicates that Covid was already spreading in Germany in December 2019.’
The same patient required a ventilator four days after admission as his condition deteriorated.
He spent a total of five days on a ventilator and was only released from the hospital on January 28, almost a full month after his initial admission.
This was a day after Germany’s first officially confirmed case of Covid – a case thought to be linked to meetings they had with a Chinese trading partner.
Medics reported that the 71-year-old man later died in April 2020, but did not say the cause.
The authors said the case added to the growing body of evidence indicating that Covid was spreading in several European countries in late 2019.
This includes the discovery of the virus in sewage samples in Italy in December 2019, nearly two months before the country’s first official diagnosis of Covid.
A separate analysis also found that blood samples used in an Italian lung cancer screening trial in October 2019 later tested positive for coronavirus.
Samples collected from French patients in December of that year – which were tested retrospectively – also came back positive for the virus, a month before the first official cases were detected.
Other findings, from Brazil and the United States, also said that Covid was spreading much earlier than the first cases in either country.
While the first cases were detected in the UK on January 29, 2020, among Chinese nationals who had arrived from Wuhan, there are similar suspicions that the virus was already present months before that date.
Beijing insisted the virus only originated in mid-December, weeks before the world was notified of an epidemic as more cases emerged.
The controversy over the time frame for the emergence of Covid is also linked to a dispute over its origins. Pictured here is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where a number of experts believe it is possible that the Covid virus may have leaked from it.
But other theories about the origin of Covid point to animals kept at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan (pictured) as the epicenter of the outbreak. Several early cases in December 2019 and January 2020 visited the site, where live animals were sold
However, leaked documents from the Chinese government indicate that officials knew of some Covid cases as early as November, which could cost the world valuable time in the initial battle against the virus.
China has also repeatedly insisted that Covid could have come from outside the country, suggesting it could have come from frozen meat imported from elsewhere in Asia, and even at one point it could have leaked from a US research lab.
The authors of the latest case report note that they could not formally diagnose their patient with Covid as his blood samples were discarded and he never took a PCR test for retrospective analysis.
The debate continues about when exactly Covid appeared and it is also related to how the virus came to be in the first place.
Some scientists support initial theories that the virus came from an unconfirmed animal source, possibly bats, before jumping to another species held on the ‘wet market’ at the center of the outbreak and then to humans.
But other experts said there was a growing body of evidence to suggest the virus did indeed leak from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as a result of the research being done there on coronaviruses.
