“Seed date” is a term used in pandemic epidemiology to identify when a disease was first established in a specific location. Knowing that date, or at least an approximate range, allows scientists and data modelers to calculate how far the disease has spread, how fast it’s spreading, and use that information to design effective responses.
Determining when a disease originated and implementing effective test-track-isolate protocols is critical to the effective management of infectious diseases. Suppression is a far easier process when you have the cooperation of governments and health authorities who value transparency and knowledge-sharing. Management becomes much tougher when
you are confronted with a virus, especially one that spreads as silently as COVID, whose country of origin attempted to hide its existence.
When the Imperial College model relied on Chinese data about the origins of COVID-19 and presumed that COVID was seeded in the United States in early January, they were likely predicating their output on flawed input.
Because the first confirmed case of COVID in the United States was identified 20 January in Washington State, setting the seed date a week or two earlier must have seemed reasonable.
It is not.
China went to great lengths to hide the existence of COVID by censoring communication about the disease and ordering lab samples destroyed. They lost control of the narrative on 30
December when two physicians, Ai Fen and Li Wenliang — one of whom has died and
the other who has since disappeared — attempted the day before to warn
colleagues of cases of “SARS” at their local hospital.
China then reported an ”unknownpneum onia” to the WHO on 31 December, and on the same day claimed they had not found evidence of human-to-human transmission.
According to Straits Times,
"Around that time,[27 Dec 2019] doctors sent at least eight other patient samples from hospitals around Wuhan to multiple Chinese genomics companies, including industry heavyweight BGI, as they worked to determine what was behind a growing number of cases of unexplained respiratory disease. The results all pointed to a dangerous SARS-like virus.”
That was days before China notified the World Health Organization (WHO) on Dec 31 about the emergence of an unidentified infectious disease, two weeks before it shared the virus’ genome sequence with the world, and crucially, more than three weeks before Chinese authorities confirmed publicly that the virus was spreading between people.
During (and likely before) that time, asymptomatic carriers were rapidly spreading the virus throughout one of the most densely populated, internationally connected cities in the world and beyond.
China did not release the RNA sequence required to create a COVID test until 12 Jan. The virus had already spread so far by that time that the first confirmed case outside China was discovered in Thailand the very next day.
Two months elapsed between the date China claims COVID originated and when the test sequence was made available. That means there were at least 60 days of undocumented spread of a highly transmissible, often asymptomatic virus. COVID could’ve seeded itself all over
the world and spread undetected for several months and no one could’ve even
tested because there was no test that could confirm COVID-19 until weeks into Jan
2020.
Without reliable data from a reliable source, we can only estimate the seed date using what we know.
So then the question becomes, what do we know?
A Mysterious Flu-like Illness Arrived in the US in Nov 2019 (uncoverdc.com)
The foregoing excerpt is taken from an article by A.J. Kay and Contributor Thomas P. Seager, PhD titled: Evidence suggests that COVID-19 was here in November. I don’t want to write much of an opinion other than it sounds very sensible and well researched. The article concludes that “we have to be open to the idea that some of our fundamental assumptions about COVID-19 are wrong.”
Read the full article at the link
below.
The Curve is Already Flat
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