A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding.
In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from COVID-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, managed to track down 13 of the sequences on Google Cloud.
When Bloom shared his experience in a report posted online, he wrote that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”
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But now an odd explanation has emerged, stemming from an editorial oversight by a scientific journal. And the sequences have been uploaded into a different database, overseen by the Chinese government.
The story began in early 2020, when researchers at Wuhan University investigated a new way to test for the deadly coronavirus sweeping the country. They sequenced a short stretch of genetic material from virus samples taken from 34 patients at a Wuhan hospital.
The researchers posted their findings online in March 2020. That month, they also uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and submitted a paper describing their results to a scientific journal called Small. The paper was published in June 2020.
Bloom became aware of the Wuhan sequences this spring while researching the origin of COVID-19. Reading a May 2020 review about early genetic sequences of coronaviruses, he came across a spreadsheet that noted their presence in the Sequence Read Archive.
But Bloom could not find them in the database. He emailed the Chinese scientists on June 6 to ask where the data went but did not get a response. On June 22, he posted his report, which was covered by The New York Times and other media outlets.
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