Scientists in China collected key coronavirus data in 2020 from a market in Wuhan — ground zero of the first reported outbreak of COVID-19 — but didn't share the raw data publicly until March 2023. And experts suspect that China has much more data from the early pandemic that "have yet to be shared" with the global research community.
That's according to a new editorial, published Thursday (April 6) in the journal Science and penned by Maria Van Kerkhove, the COVID-19 technical lead for the World Health Organization (WHO). China likely has data that could shed light on how the pandemic began, Van Kerkhove wrote, and the country's failure to disclose the data makes the whole world more vulnerable to future pandemics.
