Thanks! I remember reading about that when the article was published. I have also seen that there were unusually high numbers of "influenza like illness" in Italy and the US Pacific Northwest during the 2018-2019 flu season, and earlier in the 2019-2020 season. More recently, I also read that COVID-19 was already shown to be in America by December, 2019.

So, I am definitely open to the possibility that COVID-19 started much earlier than is being reported, which I agree, means it might not have even started in the Wuhan area. Although, the DNA's similarity to a virus from a particular type of bat in China also suggests that even if the timing is wrong, the location might still be in the region.

As I read the buzfeed article, even with the recovered DNA sequences, it still doesn't shed much light on the virus' origin. I thought it was interesting that outside researchers were able to get that data back from Google Cloud after it disappeared, though.