Images of a woman nibbling at a bat have gone around the world since the outbreak of a new deadly coronavirus.

ANALYSIS: Among the images to emerge in connection with the coronavirus outbreak is that of a young woman eating a bat.

Many of those posting the video online have linked the eating of bats - and bat soup in particular - to the spread of the virus to humans. The coronavirus may well have originated from bats, but researchers have a long way to go before being able to confirm that, or to work out how it got to humans.

Many news outlets (including a New Zealand organisation that has since removed its original story) also carried the video of the young woman nibbling on the bat wing.

TIKTOK Video of a dead bat in a pot of soup has also be included in many posts.

Some other widespread claims have tried to make a link between the illness and biological weapons (this story was also published by the same New Zealand media outlet with the headline 'Mystery lab next to coronavirus epicentre') and a patent from several years ago.

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Some other online commentators have put the number of deaths far higher than the official toll but without anything substantial to verify the claims.

Wang Mengyun about to eat bat in Palau in 2016.

Bat soup

Two videos of women eating bats have been widely circulated since the coronavirus outbreak - one was the young woman gingerly nibbling, unenthusiastically on the bat wing. The South China Morning Post said the other showed online travel show host Wang Mengyun.

Wang had written on her microblog that the video was shot in the western Pacific islands of Palau about three years ago - so completely unconnected to the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which started in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

In the video, Wang said the bat "tastes very fresh, like chicken meat". In her recent blog comment she apologised for the earlier post, saying she was not aware at the time she made it that bats could be a virus carrier.​

Many online posts also show video of the other woman nibbling on the bat wing as well as images of a large pot of soup with a dead, apparently grimacing, bat balanced on the edge. The two videos don't appear to be linked in any way.

ITN Drone video shows the shockingly fast progress made by China in building two hospitals to tackle the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan.

Wang is right about bats being virus carriers. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explained the new coronavirus - called 2019-nCoV, for now - is a betacoronavirus, as was the case with MERS and SARS - two other coronaviruses that originated in bats before spreading between people.

Some other coronaviruses that have crossed to humans from bats have done so via a third animal. For example, SARS jumped from bats to civet cats and then to humans, while MERS came via camels.

Indications were that humans had recently been infected with 2019-nCoV from an animal, CDC said.

"Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak of respiratory illness caused by 2019-nCov in Wuhan, China had some link to a large seafood and live animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread," CDC said. "Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread."

Hasty cremations of unidentified bodies

Some news organisations have also published reports suggesting Chinese authorities could be trying to keep the official death toll down by sending unidentified bodies hurriedly to be cremated.

The New Zealand Herald, news.com.au,Yahoo! News and The Sun, have carried reports quoting tweets from DW News East Asia correspondent William Yang, who tweeted about a report by Chinese media outlet Initium Media.

"Credible Chinese media outlet @initiumnews interviewed people working at local cremation centers, confirming that many dead bodies were sent directly from the hospitals to the cremation centers," Yang tweeted recently.

"... without properly identifying these patients, which means there are patients who died from the virus but not adding to the official record. That shows the current death toll of 133 that we are seeing is way too low."

WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY Wuhan Institute of Virology

The report on Initium is behind a paywall and it needs to be translated into English.

No other sources are being quoted on the cremation claims, but there have been other reports that question the candour of Chinese authorities when it comes to the coronavirus death toll.

For example, The Guardian had a report of a woman who died in Wuhan and whose death was officially put down to severe pneumonia. She was not tested for the coronavirus, hospital staff wore full hazmat suits, and her family were pressured to cremate her body immediately after she died.

Doubts also linger about Chinese openness after its efforts to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2002-03. This time though, the World Health Organisation is trying hard to emphasise the authorities are handling the outbreak well.

"The challenge is great, but the response has been massive and the Chinese government deserve huge credit for that response and for the transparency in which they have dealt with this," WHO executive director for health emergencies Dr Mike Ryan said at a recent press briefing.

Biological weapons link

In a report nearly a week ago, the conservative-outlet Washington Times quoted Dany Shoham, described as a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, saying a laboratory in Wuhan was linked to China's bio-weapons programme.

The coronavirus may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses, the report said.

As mentioned above, this was reported in New Zealand.

"Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment," Shoham was quoted saying.

But Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Washington Post: "Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus."

The Canadian link

The bio-weapons angle also has a Canadian link. This is related to an incident reported last July by the CBC in Canada.

In that report, CBC said a researcher with ties to China, her husband and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada's National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, which is equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases.

The incident happened amid a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation into what was described as a possible "policy breach" and "administrative matter".

In a report this week, CBC said its July story had been distorted in a tweet that described the couple escorted out of the lab as a "Chinese spy team" and said they had been "sending pathogens to the Wuhan facility".

The claims were also reported on Chinese-owned social media, where a video pushing the claims was watched more than 350,000 times.

The RCMP and Health Canada have stressed that there was no danger to public safety.

"This is misinformation and there is no factual basis for claims being made on social media," Eric Morrissette, chief of media relations for Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada said.

The coronavirus patent

Among those pushing misinformation about a coronavirus patent is a YouTube video producer called Jordan Sather, who appears to be a kind of conspiracy theorist and tweets about "the Cabal". In a tweet a week ago he said: "Funny enough there was a patent for the coronavirus was filed in 2015 and granted in 2018."

"Was the release of this disease planned?" Sather tweeted. "Are there vaccines already being manufactured to 'fight' this?"

The assignee of the patent was UK-based viral disease research organisation The Pirbright Institute.

Pirbright felt it needed to respond to the amount of misinformation circulating on the internet about its activities.

It said it did research on a coronavirus called infectious bronchitis virus, that infected poultry. The patent referred to by Sather "covers the development of an attenuated (weakened) form of the coronavirus that could potentially be used as a vaccine to prevent respiratory diseases in birds and other animals".

The deaths are under-reported

When it comes to claims the death toll has been under-reported, possibly the most extreme example was on the Hal Turner Radio Show in the US - the website of which is pleading for donations so it can keep going.

A story on the website from a week ago said 112,000 people had died in China from the outbreak. The number was confirmed by: "Covert Intelligence sources who are former colleagues of mine from my 15 years with the FBI ... who are presently inside China."

Also in the US, a site called the Geller Report had a link to a precious metals site called Jim Sinclair's MineSet, which posted something from "Jim's Mailbox" a week ago. That said: "I just received a call from a close American friend of mine who just got off the phone with a Chinese friend, who has relatives in Wuhan. He says there may already be ~10,000 dead there from the virus."

According to Chinese state media outlets, on Friday official data from China showed 8149 confirmed coronavirus cases in China, with 171 deaths.