The report, in the South China Morning Post, said that Chinese authorities identified at least 266 people who contracted the coronavirus last year.
The SCMP is saying it has seen the data in the report, although The Guardian has not been able to verify its authenticity.
Those people were put under medical surveillance, with the earliest case being a 55-year-old man from Hubei province, identified on November 17, 2019. The SCMP notes that some of the 266 cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.
For about a month after that earliest case was identified, there were one to five new cases reported each day, the report said, By December 20, there were 60 confirmed cases, according to The Guardian.
The Chinese government has been accused of covering up the coronavirus outbreak that has led to a global pandemic, infecting at least 128,343 people across the world and killing 4,702. Of those who have contracted the virus since it began, 68,324 people have recovered. Nearly 81,000 of the cases occurred in China, mostly in Hubei province.
China officially notified the World Health Organisation that the first confirmed case of COVID-19 had been diagnosed on December 8, 2019. Yet public authorities did not concede there was human-to-human transmission until January 21, 2020. By then, researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai had sequenced the coronavirus gene.
A report published in the medical journal The Lancet by Chinese doctors from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, which treated some of the earliest patients, puts the first known case as occurring on December 1, 2019. And the XCMP also notes that under Xi Jinping, the inclination to suppress has become endemic and, in this case, contributed to a prolonged period of inaction that allowed the virus to spread.
