Wuhan vendor or accountant: Scientist renews first known COVID case debate

A leading virologist has reported that the first known COVID-19 patient was likely a seafood vendor in a Wuhan market, and not an accountant who lived lived 30 km away, as per the previous findings of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel’s probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. WHO researchers had identified “patient zero” as a 41-year-old male accountant, who lived 30 km south of Huanan Market and had no connection to it.

“When interviewed, he reported that his COVID-19 symptoms started with a fever on 16 December; the 8 December illness was a dental problem related to baby teeth retained into adulthood,” Michael Worobey wrote in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Science.

This was corroborated by hospital records and a scientific paper that reports his COVID-19 onset date as December 16 and date of hospitalisation as December 22, Worobey said. “This indicates that he was infected through community transmission after the virus had begun spreading from Huanan Market.”

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Worobey highlighted the discrepancies by scouring through information available in medical journals, as well as video interviews of the earliest patients in a Chinese news outlet.

Worobey was one of 18 scientists who wrote a letter to Science in May calling for an probe into the the controversial “lab-leak” theory and all other possible sources of the virus.

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In the November 18 article, he noted that more than half of the earliest known cases were among those with direct connections to the market.

“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”

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Several patients with unexplained pneumonia, who were mentioned in two December 30, 2019, emergency notices by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission for internal circulation to local hospitals worked at Huanan Market, Worobey said. The first official public report was the commission’s announcement the next day “that they had carried out case searches and retrospective investigations related to Huanan Market and found 27 patients.”