World Health Organization researchers are seeking 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 shopped there.
Chinese authorities have said since early last year that the first confirmed victim was a Wuhan resident nicknamed Chen, who fell ill on December 8, 2019, and had no connection to Huanan’s fish market, which was linked to many of the early infections.
That case, and more recent evidence, led a WHO team to investigate the origins of the pandemic to conclude that the virus may have jumped from an animal to a human earlier and elsewhere and spread through Wuhan by the time an outbreak took place in the Huanan market. occurred.
The alleged patient zero met WHO researchers on their recent four-week visit to Wuhan and told them his parents had visited another local food market, three team members said.
The disclosure came at the end of the man’s meeting with WHO researchers and they were unable to identify the market or obtain further details, the team members said. They declined to comment further.
The researchers’ interest in the parents of patient zero was first reported by CNN in an interview with Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team who said the parents had tested negative, but the Chinese authorities must keep their contacts on the market. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Wuhan’s Huanan Fish Market has been linked to many of the early Covid-19 infections.
Photo:
Getty Images / Getty Images
It could not be determined when the parents were tested and whether they had PCR tests that detect current but not previous infections, or antibody screenings, which may reveal a previous infection, but also fade to undetectable levels over time. Both types of tests would not have been available in early December 2019 because the virus had not yet been identified.
Members of the WHO team want to identify the market to find out if wildlife has been sold there and to determine if any more of the 174 confirmed cases from December 2019, or possible 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 mention those places.
Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, has around 400 food markets, according to local authorities. Residents say some of them sold wildlife for meat or for traditional medicine, and sellers say goods were often traded between Huanan and other markets.
There is clear evidence of simultaneous transmission of the virus elsewhere outside the market
The lack of details on the first known case of a pandemic that has now killed more than two million shows the scale of work that remains to be done to reconcile the December Huanan market outbreak with other data showing that the virus infected people are elsewhere in Wuhan. at the same time and may have started distribution in November or October 2019.
“We need more studies of the early cases,” Peter Ben Embarek, WHO’s team leader, told the Journal. “This is in our recommendations for new work.”
China’s 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 Chinese portion of the research,” 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 draw definitive conclusions.”
The WHO will publish a summary report on the Wuhan mission in the coming days, which is expected to include a series of recommendations for studies into the origins of the pandemic. The report calls for further investigation of those earliest cases and possible cases – including the alleged patient Zero and his relatives, WHO team members said.
A full account of the trip is expected weeks later, they say.
Meanwhile, international controversy over the origins of the pandemic has been rekindled, with the US raising concerns about a lack of transparency after The Wall Street Journal reported that China had not shared raw data on confirmed or possible early cases.
The World Health Organization mission to Wuhan said the coronavirus likely spread naturally to humans through an animal. WSJ’s Jeremy Page reports on what scientists learned during their week-long research. 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 foods.
Still, Liang Wannian, the head of a Covid-19 expert panel for China’s National Health Commission, acknowledged at a press conference at the end of the WHO mission that some of the first 174 confirmed cases were “related to other markets” in Wuhan.
The Chinese authorities initially thought that the Huanan Market was the source of the outbreak, as many of the earliest identified cases had visited or worked there, because there were stalls with the kind of wildlife that spread coronaviruses in the past and because there environmental samples taken were positive. for SARS-CoV-2.
WHO scientists and other experts have long believed that the new coronavirus most likely originated in a bat and spread to humans through another animal, likely on a farm or market.
The WHO researchers say they confirmed during their visit that there are at least two types of animals that can carry the new coronavirus in the Huanan market, ferret badgers and rabbits, and suggested a possible route on how the pandemic started.
They say they have yet to determine which other animals have been sold legally or illegally, but the supply chains for the stables in question lead back to parts of southern China where the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in bats.
At the same time, there is some evidence that the virus has already spread widely throughout the city within days of the first known cases in the market, suggesting that the outbreak could have started elsewhere and spread to Huanan market.
“There is clear evidence of simultaneous transmission of the virus in other places off the market,” Thea Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the WHO 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 40s in a private company and had no recent travel history. “He has a boring and normal life in a way – no mountain walks,” said Dr. Ben Embarek.
Dr. Daszak said the man’s main hobby was surfing the Internet.
Some researchers have pointed to an elderly man who fell ill on December 1, 2019, as a possible infection before patient zero, but a doctor who treated him said he had other chronic illnesses and was unable to speak, and his exact date of symptoms 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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