China deleted COVID-19 data in possible cover-up: virologist

China deleted early COVID-19 data in a possible effort to cover up its origins — hindering the World Health Organization’s probe into whether the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, according to a scientific paper published Wednesday.

More than a dozen coronavirus test sequences taken during the pandemic’s early months were removed from an international database used to track the virus’ evolution, according to a report authored by Jesse Bloom, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Bloom concludes that China likely deleted the data from the National Institutes of Health’s Sequence Read Archive in order to “obscure their existence.”