Chinese scientists: COVID could have spread first in US

It was "highly probable" Covid-19 started to spread in the United States in September 2019, a group of Chinese scientists said in a new paper published on the preprint platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the paper, which has not been peer reviewed, the authors said they used US government public data about the numbers of diagnoses and tests as well as mortality figures from March 2020, and they developed formulas to infer the probability of Covid-19 cases in the US in 2019. They concluded there was a 50 per cent chance the first case of Covid-19 occurred…