A private analysis of cellphone location data obtained by NBC's "News Verification Unit" appears to add to the body of circumstantial evidence that the Covid-19 epidemic began after a virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
According to the data, there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, suggesting that there may have been a "hazardous event" sometime between those dates. The first documented case of the novel coronavirus has been traced back to November 17.
The report is being studied by US Intelligence, but one official who studied the data said, that it "looks really weak to me and some of the conclusions don't make sense." Nonetheless, key members of the Trump administration are continuing to insist that China was complicit in the spread of the pandemic, either due to gross negligence or deliberate malice, which China vociferously denies.