World Health Organization investigators are searching for information on a second food market in the Chinese city of Wuhan after the first officially confirmed Covid-19 case, called patient zero, told them his parents had bought there.
Chinese authorities said since early last year that the first confirmed victim was a Wuhan resident named Chen who fell ill on December 8, 2019 and had no connection to the Huanan seafood market, which was linked to many of the early infections.
That case, and more recent evidence, led a WTO team to investigate the origins of the pandemic, concluding that the virus had jumped from an animal to a human earlier and elsewhere and spread through the whole Wuhan against an outbreak in the Huanan market. took place.
The suspected patient zero met with WHO investigators during their recent four-week visit to Wuhan, and said his parents had visited another local food market, according to three team members.
The revelation comes at the end of the man’s meeting with WHO investigators and they could not identify the market or get further details, the team members said. They declined to comment further.
The investigators’ interest in patient of patient zero was first reported by CNN in an interview with Peter Daszak, a WHO team member who said the parents tested negative but the Chinese authorities still need to make their contact in the market locate. He did not respond to requests for comment.
The Huanan seafood market in Wuhan has been linked to many of the first Covid-19 infections.
Photo:
Getty Images / Getty Images
It was not possible to determine when the parents were tested and whether they had PCR tests that detect the current, but not the recent infection, or antibody screenings, which can reveal infection in the past, but can also fade to unfathomable levels over time. . Both types of tests would not be available in early December 2019 because the virus has not yet been identified.
WHO team members want to identify the market to find out if wildlife is being sold there and determine if more of the 174 confirmed cases of December 2019, or potential cases from earlier, were related to it.
The team and its Chinese counterparts have already determined that some of the 174 had connections to markets other than Huanan, although they did not name the locations.
According to local authorities, Wuhan, with 11 million inhabitants, has about 400 food markets. Residents say several of them sold game as meat or for traditional medicine, and sellers say goods were often traded between Huanan and other markets.
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There is clear evidence of the simultaneous transmission of the virus to other places outside the market
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The lack of details surrounding the first known case in a pandemic that has now killed more than two million shows the extent of the work still to be done to reconcile the outbreak of the Huanan market in December with other data show virus-infected people elsewhere in Wuhan. at the same time and may have started spreading in November or October 2019.
“We need more studies on the early cases,” WHO team leader Peter Ben Embarek told the Journal. “This is in our recommendations for new work.”
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Health Commission did not respond to requests for comment.
The episode “highlights the need for the WHO team to continue their China segment of the investigation,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Given the complexity and importance of their work, one month is not enough to make conclusive findings.”
The WHO will publish a comprehensive report on the Wuhan mission in the coming days, which is expected to include a series of recommendations for studies on the origins of the pandemic. According to the WTO team members, the previous cases and possible cases, including the alleged patient zero, and his family members will have to be further investigated.
According to them, a full report on the travel weeks is expected.
Meanwhile, international controversy over the outbreak of the pandemic has resurfaced, and the US has expressed concern over a lack of transparency after The Wall Street Journal reported that China did not share raw data on confirmed or possible early cases.
According to the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan, the coronavirus probably spread naturally to humans through an animal. Jeremy Page of WSJ reports on what scientists learned during their week-long investigation. Photo: Thomas Peter / Reuters
Beijing responded by accusing Washington of undermining the WHO and reiterating its claim that the virus could have originated in another country and spread to Wuhan via imported frozen food.
However, Liang Wannian, head of an expert panel of Covid-19 for China’s National Health Commission, acknowledged at a news conference at the end of the WHO mission that some of the first 174 confirmed cases were ‘related to other markets’. in Wuhan.
Chinese authorities initially thought the Huanan market was the source of the outbreak because many of the earliest identified cases had visited or worked there, because there were stalls selling the kind of game that coronaviruses had spread in the past and because environmental samples what was taken there was positive. for SARS-CoV-2.
WHO scientists and other experts have long believed that the new coronavirus probably originated in a bat and was spread to humans by another animal, probably on a farm or in a market.
WHO researchers said during their visit that they confirmed that there were at least two types of animals that could carry the new coronavirus on the Huanan market, tie ties and rabbits, which provided one possible way for how the pandemic started.
They say they have yet to determine which other animals were sold legally or illegally, but the supply chains for the stalls in question lead back to parts of southern China, where the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were found in bats.
At the same time, there are indications that the virus had already spread widely in the market within a few days after the first known cases, suggesting that the outbreak could have started elsewhere and spread to the Huanan market.
“There is clear evidence of the simultaneous transmission of the virus elsewhere outside the market,” Thea Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist in the WTO team, told reporters in Wuhan. “It seems less likely that the market is the source of the virus epidemic.”
Dr. Ben Embarek told CNN in an interview this month that patient zero was an office worker in his private business in his forties and had no recent travel history. “He has a very, in a way, a dull and normal life – no type of things to hike in the mountains,” said dr. Ben Embarek said.
Dr. Daszak said the man’s most important hobby was surfing the internet.
Some researchers pointed to an elderly man who became ill on December 1, 2019 as a possible infection before patient zero, but a doctor who treated him said he had other chronic diseases and could not speak, and its exact date of symptoms the onset was unclear as it was estimated by family members.
Write to Jeremy Page at [email protected], Drew Hinshaw at [email protected] and Betsy McKay at [email protected]
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