Beijing said that Harvard University's perception that Covid-19 could appear from August 2019 was an "American effort to spread fabricated information".

Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, USA, published a new study on the DASH portal on June 8, suggesting that Covid-19 could appear in Wuhan, the capital of China's Hubei province, from early May.

The study is based on satellite images of car traffic in five hospitals in Wuhan since early August 2019, as well as a trend of searching for keywords like "cough" and "diarrhea" online.

Speaking at a news conference in Beijing on June 11, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she believed the research was evidence of coordinated efforts in the US to "deliberately create

"Some American politicians and media acted as if they found the buried treasure and spread the research indiscriminately, seeing it as new evidence that China concealed the epidemic."

China announced the first cases of nCoV in Wuhan in December 2019 and shared the virus genome with the World Health Organization (WHO) in early January.

Many countries, including the US and Australia, have called for an international investigation of the origin of Covid-19.

Covid-19 in more than 210 countries and territories caused more than 7.6 million people to be infected and more than 424,000 to die.