In China, researchers isolated and mapped the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus at the end of December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world. This was revealed exclusively on Wall Street Journal, after examining some documents that the US Department of Health obtained from a House committee. According to Wsja Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded an almost complete sequence of the structure of Covid to a database managed by the US government on December 28, 2019, while China shared the sequence of the virus with the World Health Organization (WHO) only on January 11 2020. Those delays and those shadows at the beginning of 2020 meant that the response to the nascent pandemic was slow to materialize.
When researcher Lili Ren of the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing had already mapped the virus, Chinese officials were still publicly describing the outbreak in Wuhan as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the local wholesale market of live animals, site of one of the first outbreaks of Covid-19. This new information, the newspaper points out, does not shed light on the debate whether the coronavirus emerged from an infected animal or a laboratory leak, but suggests that the world does not yet have a complete explanation of the origin of the pandemic.
The extra two weeks could still have proved crucial in helping the international medical community identify how Covid-19 spreads, develop medical defenses and initiate a possible vaccine, according to specialists. In late 2019, scientists and governments around the world were racing to understand the mysterious disease they would eventually call Covid-19 that would kill millions of people.