1/ It was easy to miss Dr Lucey's excellent questions about the mounting number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Dec 19 - acknowledged all indirectly and through the back-door, never in a direct manner:
sciencespeaksblog.org/2020/11/28/fiv…

2/ Recap: On the 5th Nov the Terms of Reference (ToRs) of the WHO mission were quietly published on the WHO website. These terms were negotiated with China and finalised on 31st July.
These ToRs contain a crucial new piece of information:

3/ "Retrospective review of cases identified a total of 124 confirmed cases with onset date in December 2019, 119 of whom were from Wuhan and 5 others from Hubei or other provinces, but all with travel links to Wuhan during the period of exposure."
drive.google.com/file/d/1rx0W2e…

4/ This is the ** first and only ** official recognition of new Dec cases beyond the 41 disclosed on the 2nd Jan 2020 at the express request of the WHO (whereby WHO member countries have 48 hours to answer). These were the 41 mentioned in the Lancet paper.

5/ This raises important questions:
a. Why were these 124 confirmed Dec 19 cases never mentioned before?
b. Was the 'Retrospective review of cases' the Rushed Data Collection discussed in the below article?

gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/early-cases-of…

6/ c. Why was this crucial information withheld from at least the 31st July (finalisation of the ToRs) to the 5th Nov 2020 (publication of the ToRs)?

7/ d. Why is the scientific community not given access to these cases and to any corresponding SARS-CoV-2 sequences — ** absolutely basic steps to do research into the virus phylogeny and its likely origins ** ?

8/ e. Given that there are so many confirmed cases with Dec onset, there must clearly be Nov cases too. Why did the ‘retrospective review’ mentioned not return any? Was it artificially limited to December?

9/ The question above are very important:

The role of the WHO is to help find out the origins of SARS-CoV-2. By withholding information the WHO seems unfortunately to be doing just the opposite.

So when can scientists get the detail of these cases and the sequenced viruses?

@threadreaderapp compile