The study, which has not yet been peer-viewed, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier; and an uptick in searches of keywords associated with an infectious disease on China's Baidu search engine.
The reseachers note they can't directly link the traffic volume to the virus; even if there was an increase in traffic to hospitals, it doesn't mean a new virus was the cause. There has been no other evidence to show the virus was circulating in China in the late summer. [...]
Using images from October 2018, the researchers counted 171 cars in the parking lots at one of Wuhan's largest hospitals, Tianyou Hospital. Satellite data a year later showed 285 vehicles in the same lots, an increase of 67%, and as much as a 90% increase in traffic during the same time period at other Wuhan hospitals. [...]
"The data is actually especially compelling because we saw increases in people searching for gastrointestinal disease -- diarrhea -- which were increasing at a level that we hadn't seen at all, historically, and we now know now that gastrointestinal symptoms are a really important marker for Covid," he added. "A huge percentage of people that actually end up testing positive in Wuhan actually had presented symptoms of diarrhea."
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