There have been more than 100 confirmed deaths and 4,500 cases in China.
But lack of transparency from the Chinese authorities has led to the rise of numerous conspiracies since the outbreak. Some claim that bat soup was the source of the virus, while made more preposterous claims that the outbreak was planned and some suggest that the virus was leaked from a Chinese biological weapon programme.
But based on official research, the virus is thought to have emerged from illegally traded wildlife at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, reports BBC.
‘Coronavirus from bat soup’
There have been online speculations about the origin of coronavirus. The situation was aggravated amid the outbreak when videos purportedly showing the Chinese people eating bats circulated online.
When one such video, showing a smiling Chinese woman, holding a cooked bat resurfaced, many outraged users blamed the eating habits of the Chinese for the outbreak.
But it turned out that the video was shot in 2016 in Palau.
Although recent researches from China have named bats as a possible source of the virus, bat soup is not particularly commonplace in the country.
‘Planned’ outbreak
As the US reported its first case of the coronavirus, several patent documents started to circulate on Twitter and Facebook that at first glance appear to suggest that experts have been aware of the virus for years.
One of the first users to float these allegations was conspiracy theorist and YouTuber Jordan Sather.
In a lengthy thread that has been retweeted thousands of times, he shared a link to a 2015 patent filed by the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, England, that talks about developing a weakened version of coronavirus for potential use as a vaccine to prevent or treat respiratory diseases.
The same link has also been widely circulated on Facebook, mainly in conspiracy and anti-vaccination groups.
'Bioweapon' conspiracies
Another claim that has gone viral suggests the virus was part of China's "covert biological weapons programme" and may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Many who have been supporting the theory cite two widely-shared Washington Times articles which quote a former Israeli military intelligence officer.
But the articles provide no evidence and quote the source as saying that "so far there isn't evidence or indication" to suggest there was a leak.
The articles have so far been posted to hundreds of different social accounts to a potential audience of millions.
'Spy team'
Another wild theory linked the virus to the suspension of a researcher at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory.
Virologist Dr Xiangguo Qiu, her husband and some of her students from China were removed from the lab following a possible "policy breach," according to a report by Canada's national broadcaster CBC last year.
Police told CBC that there was "no threat to public safety".
Another report said Dr Qiu had visited the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences twice a year for two years.
A tweet with thousands of likes and retweets claimed that Dr Qiu and her husband were a "spy team", who had sent "pathogens to the Wuhan facility", and that her husband "specialised in coronavirus research".
But no evidence was offered to support the claims.
CBC has reported that these claims are baseless.
The ‘video of Wuhan nurse’
Meanwhile, a video of a woman who has been speculated to be either a ‘doctor’ or a ‘nurse’ in Hubei, has racked up millions of views on social media. In one of the versions of the video, the uploader claims that she is a nurse at Wuhan hospital but she makes no claim herself in the clip.
The woman, who does not identify herself, is wearing protective suit in an unknown location but her suit and mask do not match the ones worn by medical staff in Hubei.
She makes a number of unsubstantiated claims about the virus, making it unlikely for her to be a nurse or a paramedic, according to the BBC report.
She claims that the actual number of people infected in China is 90,000. But officials have so far confirmed more than 4,500 infections. She also claims the virus has a "second mutation", which can infect up to 14 people.
"She doesn't sound like someone from [a] medical professional background," Muyi Xiao, a Wuhan native and the visuals editor for the ChinaFile online magazine, told the BBC.
"… No one knows the truth," Badiucao, a Chinese political activist currently based in Australia, told the BBC. "No transparency [has] just left people guessing and panicking."