Spending on tests that can be used to detect the novel coronavirus soared in Wuhan, China, several months before the first official reporting of COVID-19 cases, according to research by Australian cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0.
The firm tracked the sales of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests over several years, revealing an almost 50 percent increase between 2018 to 2019—the year before the COVID-19 outbreak spread across the world, suggesting the possibility that the virus was already circulating in communities during the northern summer in 2019 before it was made public by Beijing.
