First known case may have been a Wuhan market vendor: Study

BEIJING/WASHINGTON: The first identified Covid-19 case was a vendor at a seafood market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and not, as thought earlier, an accountant without any link to the market, a new study published in the journal Science, said on Thursday.

The origins of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19 remains a mystery, and a major source of tension between China and several western countries.

The identification of the accountant as the first patient with Covid-19 symptoms had added to the speculation that the virus could have leaked from a virus laboratory located across the Yangtze river from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, the first pandemic epicentre.

Beijing has consistently denied the lab leak theory, and claiming instead that cases of the viral fever had been diagnosed in other countries before Wuhan. The new study adds to the voices suggesting that the virus may have emerged from an animal. It says that the World Health Organization and China inquiry into the origins had got the initial chronology of the outbreak wrong.

According to virologist Michael Worobey, rather than the original patient being a man who had never been to the Wuhan market, the first known case of Covid-19 turns out to be a woman, a vendor at the market.

“His (the accountant’s) symptom onset came after multiple cases in workers at Huanan market, making a female seafood vendor there the earliest known case, with illness onset on December 11,” said Worobey, who is head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

“Given the high transmissibility of Sars-CoV-2 and the high rate of asymptomatic spread, many symptomatic cases would inevitably soon lack a direct link to the location of the pandemic’s origin,” he wrote. The virologist went through publicly available data including hospital records and interviews of patients to arrive at this conclusion.

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Covid booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer were cleared on Friday by US regulators for all Americans 18 and older, making millions more people eligible for extra protection. A panel of experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policies were expected to review the evidence and make further guidance for administering booster shots at a meeting later on Friday.