In a recent article I asked why U.S. intelligence officials were following the coronavirus outbreak in China in November 2019 when there is no evidence anyone in China was aware of or concerned about the virus at that point. I noted that no evidence had been produced to explain how they spotted it and why they were concerned. Combined with a lack of cooperation with investigations into Covid origins and multiple signs of a cover-up, this unexplained early awareness of the virus is not just mysterious but suspicious.
Since publishing that piece I have been reminded about a report from Harvard University produced in June 2020 (apparently with intelligence community involvement) that appeared alongside a companion news report for ABC News and showed satellite images from Wuhan in the autumn of 2019 along with some data analysis, indicating increased hospital activity and other possible signals of disease outbreak.
The clear implication of the Harvard study is that these are the data (or some of them) that the intelligence community relied on in November 2019 to identify the outbreak and raise the alarm. The news report states the study used “techniques similar to those employed by intelligence agencies” and was “similar to work done by analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency”. The Pentagon’s Chief Spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, told ABC News he had “nothing to add” to the Harvard study, implying endorsement.
It’s therefore worth asking whether the data in the study can account for the U.S. intelligence community’s early awareness and alarm. Let’s take a look.
Here are the first two figures from the report.
The top chart (a) shows hospital traffic estimates from satellite images for six hospitals in Wuhan and an orange trend line that shows a smoothed overall figure. There is clearly a rising trend of overall hospital activity during October and November that wasn’t present the previous year (note that the middle vertical dashed line is December 1st and the third vertical dashed line is January 23rd). So we seem to have here a signal of modestly increased hospital activity which may be indicative of an outbreak. However, on closer inspection, the fainter hospital-specific data points reveal that this extra activity was focused in two hospitals in particular: Hubei Women and Children and Wuhan Tianyou. The data points are also erratic, spiking for one data point in early November but dropping sharply again later in November before spiking again in December. It’s fair to say this is not the clearest of signals. But perhaps the other data will be clearer.
The second chart (b) shows ‘Baidu’ search queries – which capture the frequency of internet and mobile phone searches – for ‘cough’ and ‘diarrhoea’ in Wuhan. The authors rightly draw attention to a signal of elevated searches for ‘diarrhoea’ after August (the first vertical dashed line). However, they also claim there is a signal for ‘cough’, but as can be seen in the chart, compared to the previous year no such elevated level of searches occurs prior to December. There is then a modest spike in searches for ‘cough’ during December, but even then it is well below the level of the previous year. In other words, there is no indication from these data of an outbreak of a coughing disease in Wuhan during autumn 2019, i.e., there is no Covid signal.
Noting the rise in ‘diarrhoea’ searches, the Harvard researchers suggest this means we should pay more attention to unusual symptoms in identifying a Covid outbreak. A more convincing conclusion, though, is that there was an outbreak of an unrelated diarrhoea bug during late summer and autumn in Wuhan. Such an outbreak may be sufficient to explain the increased hospital traffic at the time, particularly at the children’s hospital – which would also be less likely to be explained by a Covid outbreak. At one hospital the traffic was shown to be particularly elevated in October (see below), which is way too early for the ‘cough’ signal, but fits with when diarrhoea searches were elevated.
The third chart (c) from the report, above, shows the proportion of influenza-like illness admissions in two Wuhan hospitals. It again notably reveals a lack of admissions for influenza-like illness during October and November (prior to the middle vertical dashed line). There is then a spike in December, which matches the spike in ‘cough’ searches. But, importantly, nothing in November when U.S. intelligence analysts claim to have spotted the Covid outbreak. This means, whatever was causing the elevated hospital traffic at some Wuhan hospitals in September, October and November 2019, it wasn’t an influenza-like illness such as COVID-19.
On these data, then, it’s not at all clear how U.S. intelligence analysts could have seen a signal of a ‘cataclysmic‘ outbreak of a respiratory virus in Wuhan in mid-November 2019 that they felt compelled to warn their Government and allies about. There is no sign of a respiratory virus outbreak here – searches for ‘cough’ remained low in November and admissions for influenza-like illness were normal.
In a way, this lack of signal from Covid is, we should note, unexpected. After all, we know from other sources that the virus likely was already spreading both in Wuhan and more widely by November 2019, so we might have expected there to have been some signal for U.S. intelligence to have picked up on. On the other hand, we also know that this early spread was undetected everywhere at the time and did not cause large waves of hospitalisations and deaths. Since no country including China appears to have spotted the virus spreading within its own borders during November 2019, the question of how U.S. intelligence spotted it in Wuhan (and only in Wuhan) remains salient.
Thus this Harvard report, intended to show how U.S. intelligence analysts spotted the virus in November 2019 in China even though China itself had not noticed it yet, has ended up inadvertently revealing there was no signal of a respiratory viral outbreak in Wuhan at that time and thus no way that U.S. intelligence analysts could have spotted one.
Naturally, this does nothing to diminish the growing suspicions about how U.S. intelligence came to be following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, and only Wuhan, at a time when no one else, including the Chinese, were even aware of its existence.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Naturally, this does nothing to diminish our growing suspicions about how U.S. intelligence came to be following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, and only Wuhan, at a time when no one else, including the Chinese, were even aware of its existence.
Ummm. Pregnant questions which are crying out for answers. I’ve made my working hypotheses clear on here – and I add that they’re only hypotheses, suggestions – I’m not saying that’s what happened. Just putting up ideas to be shot down, or if not shot down probed further.
The lack of a hospital signal for a significant respiratory virus outbreak serves only to sharpen the questions as to how the US intelligence agencies seem to have been aware of what was going on in the fall of 2019.
This series of related articles from Will seem to me to be most important, a growing body of work that deserves ongoing refinement and exploration. Might it be helpful if links to each piece were placed in a separate folder on the web page or the like? Imv they are far too important to be lost with the ephemera of previous days posts.
Happy 2023 everyone – if that isn’t an oxymoron. In many ways things seem better than exactly a year ago (e.g. jab pressure gone), but in many other deeper ways things seem worse.
Things are worse, they’ve been emboldened.
To point out the obvious, which perhaps Will was too polite to do so here: the Harvard report, endorsed by the US intelligence agencies as it appears to have been, was an ideal and very convenient conduit for those same agencies being able to explain how they knew about the outbreak in the fall of 2019. A ‘useful’ piece of cover pretty well blown away by Will’s article.
I return to my suspicion that the US Intelligence agencies were told secretly about a virus escape circa August by individual(s) working in the Wuhan Lab, who after all were apparently effectively merely employees of the US State working in China, answerable to the US, and presumably shit scared should what they had done come to the attention of Chinese authorities.
In response to Will’s latest three articles (21 Dec., 30 Dec., and above) on the origin of the SARS-COV-2 outbreak in the second half of 2019, I’ve been wondering about the origins of Event 201, held on 18 October 2019 in New York – when was it organised, and in particular when were the wargaming parameters specified?
If the coronavirus parameters were specified only late in the day – say after about late August – then this may possibly be interpreted as a US Intelligence-instigated response to a coronavirus outbreak which they knew had already occurred in China.
I haven’t got much time available to probe this, but the upcoming Event 201 appears to have been announced by the John Hopkins Center on 21 August 2019. Notably at that point the event description speaks only of a ‘global pandemic’, and does not mention a coronavirus.
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/news/center-news/2019/2019-08-21-event201.html
If the US authorities did instigate Event 201 then they must have begun doing so by about the middle of August 2019. (Of course, there is also the possibility that, an any point up to about early October, they hijacked an already planned event to pursue a coronavirus scenario.)
Mrs TJN thinks I should get a life.
This is the weaponised state actively searching for an excuse to put in place an evil plan, locking healthy ppl down so they can inflict experimental gene therapy on them, nothing more. They don’t care 2 hoots about human life, in fact they see it as a pestilence they are managing on mother earth’s behalf. The more evidence comes to light the more likely this virus was deliberately “set free”.
The CIA admit they helped to kill Kennedy, US intelligence knew about covid before China did! Hiroshima and Nagasaki where left untouched from the start of ww2 to test the devastation of the A bomb, You have to have an amazing memory to keep up these lies, what’s next? The moon landings?
watch this space…(the final frontier, or lie)!
Don’t get involved in the moon landing debate, they probably did go there, it’s pointless debate anyway and used merely to discredit ppl who question the establishment in other far more important areas. I suspect the theories that we didn’t go start in the CIA.
COVID was in England in September 2019. The reason nobody noticed anything unusual wrt hospitalizations or deaths was that nothing unusual was happening. COVID as staged pandemic with the intent to sell miracle cures for it didn’t (and couldn’t) take off before mass testing became available around January 2020. Then, COVID deaths, defined as death after a positive test, and COVID hospitalizations, defined as person tests positive on hospital admission for whatever reasons, were quickly invented and mercilessly forced into the news headlines for almost two years. Once it became clear that peak vaxx had been achieved and passed, the nonsense again faltered. Minus all kinds of more of less influential, political fringe groups still trying to employ it here and there to achieve their various ends.
The whole thing has been a scam from start to finish.
The CDC, which was not designed to run public health campaigns, was designed to run great research and does have as much scientific integrity as is compatible with keeping their jobs.
The CDC tested archived Red Cross blood and found Covid-19 well established (1-4% Covid seropositive) across the USA by December, 2019: “Serologic testing of US. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies”.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472
The CDC then identified the world’s first Covid death, in Kansas, a week before the first Chinese death. https://tinyurl.com/bddh5vbz
No surprises then.
Watch any documentary on 9/11 and feel your jaw drop at the schoolboy incompetence of the US government. Bush’s gormless face and cabinet that came up with a solution of throwing a groundsheet on the Potus and leave him in the corner. Talk about unqualified to lead a nation. Peter Sellers wouldn’t have made up anything so funny. The flu comes along and here we are folks