Report: First COVID-19 case was a female food vendor at Wuhan market
The first known case of COVID-19 was in a vendor at a live animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China, a new report claims.
Dr. Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, says the World Health Organization (WHO) misconstrued the early timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Dr. Michael, he believes the first confirmed infection to be in a female seafood vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market who fell ill on December 11, 2019.
Previously, the earliest case of the virus was believed to have been a 41-year-old male accountant who lived 20 miles south of the market.
China first alerted the world to cases of COVID-19 when local authorities alerted the WHO to cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown causes’ on December 31, 2019.
Reports from Chinese officials said early cases were associated with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which also sold live animals.
However, there has been much debate over whether the virus originated in animals or was manufactured in a lab.
For the report, published in the journal Science, Worobey looked at early public records of the Covid pandemic’s timeline.
This includes articles in medical journals and interviews with a Chinese news outlet with the people believed to have the first documented cases of the virus.
With several reports linking at least half of the earliest cases to the market, Worobey believes that pattern means that’s where it started.
