Coronavirus might have been spreading in China as early as August last year according to Harvard Medical School research.
The research used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in Wuhan, where the disease was first identified in late 2019, and data for symptom-related queries on search engines for things such as "cough" and "diarrhoea".
"Increased hospital traffic and symptom search data in Wuhan preceded the documented start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in December 2019," according to the research.
"While we cannot confirm if the increased volume was directly related to the new virus, our evidence supports other recent work showing that emergence happened before identification at the Huanan Seafood market (in Wuhan)."
"These findings also corroborate the hypothesis that the virus emerged naturally in southern China and was potentially already circulating at the time of the Wuhan cluster," according to the research.
The World Health Organisation has been looking into when coronavirus patients are most infections, and have found its just at the point when they first feel unwell.
WHO experts said that's made it hard to control the spread of the virus, but it can be done with testing and social distancing.
Taking a look at how cases are travelling around the globe, and the UK has seen 286 deaths in the past 24 hours, while Northern Ireland has gone three days without a fatality reports the Daily Mail.
The official death toll is 40,968 in the UK with 290,576 cases according to John Hopkins University.
US reports 1,971,302 cases and 111,751 deaths; Brazil has the second highest number of cases at 707,412 and the third-highest deaths at 37,134.
Russia has recorded 484,630 cases and 6134 deaths, while Italy has 34,043 deaths and 235,561 cases.
India has the fifth-highest cases at 276,146 and Spain the sixth at 241,966 with 27,136 deaths.
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Kim Chappell
As Senior Producer - Digital for ACM's regional titles I assist newsrooms in digital best practice. Before this role, I was the digital journalist with ACM's national team and prior to that, the digital specialist with ACM's Agricultural division. I started as a general rounds journalist with The Land in 2006, moving up to hold the title of chief of staff before switching to digital reporting in 2015.
As Senior Producer - Digital for ACM's regional titles I assist newsrooms in digital best practice. Before this role, I was the digital journalist with ACM's national team and prior to that, the digital specialist with ACM's Agricultural division. I started as a general rounds journalist with The Land in 2006, moving up to hold the title of chief of staff before switching to digital reporting in 2015.
