/ AP
Medical workers move the body of a person who had died from COVID-19 at a hospital in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 16, 2020.
Thirteen genetic sequences — isolated from people with COVID-19 infections in the early days of the pandemic in China — were mysteriously deleted from an online database last year but have now been recovered.
Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and specialist in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, found that the sequences had been removed from an online database at the request of scientists in Wuhan, China. But with some internet sleuthing, he was able to recover copies of the data stored on Google Cloud.