That means not only that the virus was in the lab, but that it was amplified to make more of it so it could be used as a control to develop the test, says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona.

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet.

For as long as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China has been raging, public health officials have kept their eyes on one key variable: whether the virus was continuing to spread even far away from the epicenter in Wuhan .On Tuesday, officials in Japan, Taiwan, and Germany all reported their first cases of domestic human-to-human transmission.

Almost thirty years ago, Philip Strong, the founder of the sociological study of epidemic infectious diseases, observed that any new infection prompted three epidemics: of fear, then moralization, then action.Whenever new infections emerged, the first response was invariably fear that they’d become an existential threat to humanity.

But a Canadian health monitoring platform sent news of the outbreak to its customers more than a week earlier , on December 31.

But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.

The Chinese government announced Wednesday that it would quarantine the city of Wuhan, the center of an outbreak of a new viral disease that has (officially) killed 17 people and infected more than 500.