[throwaway290]

If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).

There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)

[oneshtein]

There was similar report about sudden increase of cases of atypical pneumonia at Oct 16, 2019 in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia, Russia: about 700 cases per week, which is similar to Covid-19 levels.

[krona]

The main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline on Sep 12th 2019.

[mitjam]

Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...

[throwaway290]

Would it mean it was active earlier but a critical mass was needed to cause a pandemic? Or it evolved in humans while circulating Wuhan?

[throwaway290]

That's a smoking gun. And next month it was likely already circulating in Wuhan (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/first-covid-19-case-coul...), coincidence.

> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.

[oneshtein]

No, it doesn't. Quote from the article:

> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.

[amyames]

>no similar reports

Covid detected in wastewater samples

December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

>November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v...

They found covid in samples of the sewage system in SC state Brazil in November. 2 months before it came out of wuhan

https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/novo-coronavirus-ja-estav...

>March 2019 in Spain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.

https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/dados-covid-downl...

[throwaway290]

Spain paper was not peer-reviewed.

November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.

April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.

> 2 months before it came out of wuhan

Source? I bet it came out earlier. It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.