OREANDA-NEWS. The television channel CNN reports that in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the workload of hospitals increased already in August last year. This is the conclusion of a group of researchers from Harvard Medical School who analyzed satellite imagery over the past two years.

The authors of the study draw their conclusions based on photos of parking lots near the largest hospitals in Wuhan. A sharp increase in the number of cars near medical institutions compared to 2018 began to be recorded at the end of summer, and by October the congestion of cars increased by 90 %.

Scientists also noted that already in early autumn, the Chinese search engine Baidu registered a rise in the number of requests for cough and diarrhea, symptoms that are characteristic of COVID-19.

The head of the research group, John Brownstein, noted that the task of scientists is to understand what exactly happened in Wuhan before the epidemic. According to him, the study of congestion in parking lots in Latin America made it possible to identify outbreaks of influenza in different cities, therefore the data from China can be considered as evidence that there were problems.