A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry probably got the early chronology of the epidemic wrong. The first known patient with the coronaviruses was not an accountant but a vendor in a large animal market.
The debate over whether the swine flu started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, or a leak from a lab will continue after the report is published in the journal Science. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has led to a lot of fighting.
The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two
The vendor has ties to the market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients, suggesting that the epidemic began there.
Half of the early cases are linked to a place that is the size of a soccer field. If the outbreak didn't start at the market, it becomes difficult to explain.
The first case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor, according to several experts.
The larger question of how the epidemic began is still unanswered. They suggested that the virus may have spread to the entire market before the vendor's case. The vendor got sick weeks before the first infections were thought to have happened.
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has a virologist who doesn't disagree with the analysis. The Huanan Seafood Market was clearly a super-spreading event, but I don't agree that any of the data is strong enough or complete enough to say anything very confidently.
The W.H.O. report has been found to contain mistakes before, including errors involving early patients.
He said that it was mind- ing odd that there were inconsistencies about when this happened.
The image is.
The emergency response vehicle left the closed seafood market in January 2020.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a dingy and poorlyventilated space where seafood, poultry, meat and wild animals were sold, was the cause of a number of mysterious cases of pneumonia. Hospitals were told to report any new cases linked to the market.
The Huanan market was shut down by the police on New Year's Day 2020 because of fears of a repeat of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SIRS, that emerged from Chinese animal markets in 2002. There were more cases in Wuhan despite those measures.
The cases had begun on Dec. 8. They identified the first patient in February as a Wuhan resident with the name Chen, who fell sick on December 8 and had no link to the market.
The initial high percentage of cases linked to the market may have been a statistical fluke. They thought the call from officials to report illnesses may have led doctors to overlook other cases.
In May 2020, the director of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that the seafood market may have the novel coronaviruses. The market is one of the victims.
Senior members of the Trump administration were promoting a scenario in the spring of 2020 that the H1N1 virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is eight miles away from the Huanan market.
The W.H.O. sent researchers to China in January of this year to interview an accountant who had developed symptoms on December 8. He was described as the first known case in a March report.
The W.H.O. team had been wrong according to Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance.
The December eighth date was a mistake.
The W.H.O. team never asked the accountant when his symptoms began. They were given the Dec. 8 date by doctors from the hospital who did not care for Mr. Chen. The mistake lies there, Dr. Daszak said.
The W.H.O experts were not interested in the interview because the accountant had no apparent links to animal markets, labs or mass gatherings. He told them he liked jogging and spending time on the internet. Dr. Daszak said that he was as boring as you could get.
The team would have been more aggressive in asking questions like what stall she worked in and where her products came from if it had identified the seafood vendor as the first known case.
The lab-leak theory has been criticized by Dr. Daszak this year. The EcoHealth Alliance and his organization have taken heat for their research collaborations. EcoHealth was in violation of the terms and conditions of its grant for research on coronaviruses in bats.
A senior doctor at the hospital where Mr. Chen was treated told a Chinese news outlet that he developed symptoms around Dec. 16.
China's National Health Commission said it stood by comments made by the leader of the Chinese side of the W.H.O.-China investigation who led the interview with the doctors. The earliest Covid case was not connected to the Huanan market, Mr. Liang said at a news conference in February of this year.
The image is.
The W.H.O.'s coronaviruses investigation team received a temperature check in China in February.
The W.H.O. experts could not confirm that the Huanan market was the source of the virus, but they concluded that it most likely spread to people from an animal spillover. They said that a lab leak was very unlikely.
The report has been criticized for several errors. The first family cluster of cases was wrongly linked to the Huanan market by the Washington Post in July, because the report listed the wrong viral samples for several early patients. The W.H.O. promised to fix the errors, but they remain in the report on the organization's website. The organization said that it would ask the authors how they would correct the mistakes.
The W.H.O. team gave the lab-leak theory a short shrift after it was published, according to 18 prominent scientists. They argued that more research was needed to determine if one explanation was more likely than the other.
The early days of the Covid epidemic have been pieced together by Dr. Worobey. He was confused to see a description of a man who had no contact with the market. The authors of the study said his symptoms were dated to Dec. 16.
Mr. Chen appeared to be a second independent source for the later date.
A man identified as Mr. Chen said in a video interview that he had a high temperature on the 16th. The video shows that Mr. Chen is a 41-year-old who worked in the finance office of the company. The official reports said he lived in the district.
The New York Times could not confirm the identity of the man in the video.
Mr. Chen went to the hospital that day because he felt a tightness in his chest. He said he would feel short of breath without any strenuous exercise.
The medical records shown in the video might hold clues to how the W.H.O.-China report ended up with the wrong date. Mr. Chen needed to have his teeth removed. A prescription for antibiotics was written the day before the dental surgery.
Mr. Chen speculated on the video that he might have gotten Covid when he went to the hospital.
The Washington Post noted in July that the details provided by the W.H.O. for the Dec. 8 case seemed to fit better with an entry from an online database of viral samples linked to someone who got sick on Dec. The W.H.O. said it was looking into the discrepancy.
The New York Times was told that it would be difficult to comment on the first case because the W.H.O. team had limited access to health data. It was important for investigators to look for patients with infections earlier.
The image is.
The person who died of Covid was moved out of the hospital.
The earliest case is not Mr. Chen, but a seafood vendor named Wei Guixian, who developed symptoms around Dec. 11. In a video published by The Paper, Ms. Wei said that she began to feel unwell on December 11. There was a case linked to the market in the W.H.O.-China report.
Hospitals reported more than a dozen likely cases before the day the authorities told doctors to be on the lookout for ties to the market.
He determined that the seven cases of unexplained pneumonia that were recognized by the two hospitals were Covid-19. Four out of seven cases were linked to the market.
He argued that by focusing on just these cases, he could rule out the possibility that ascertainment bias skewed the results in favor of the market.
Other scientists said it was not certain that the epidemic began at the market.
Dr. W. Ian Lipkin said that the hypothesis was reasonable and that he had done an excellent job of reconstructing what he could from the available data. I don't think we'll ever know what's going on because it's two years ago.
The Broad Institute's Alina Chan is one of the most vocal proponents of investigating a lab leak.
There are errors in the W.H.O.-China report and there is a lack of access to data.
Eleanor and Liu Yi both contributed to the research.
