First known COVID case was vendor at Wuhan market, scientist claims

A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early COVID-19 cases in China reported Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it.

The report, published in the prestigious journal Science, will revive, although certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spill- over from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a cen- tury has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question.

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 docu- mented infections.

Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new anal- ysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest the pandemic began there.

“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.”

Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the WHO, said Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of COVID was most likely a seafood vendor.

But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the mar- ket. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-november 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.

“I don’t disagree with the analysis,” said Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “But I don’t agree that any of the data are strong enough or complete enough to say anything confidently, other than that the Huanan Seafood Market was clearly a superspreading event.”

Bloom also noted that this was not the first time the WHO report, done in collaboration with Chinese researchers, was found to contain mistakes, including errors involving early patients’ potential links to the market.