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A scientist who studies public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported Thursday that an influential World Health Organization investigation likely misunderstood the early chronology of the pandemic. The new analysis shows that the first known patient to contract the coronavirus was a salesman at a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived miles from Wuhan.
NS reportPublished on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, it certainly won’t end the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spread from commercially available wildlife, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab, or some other way. Investigating the origins of the biggest public health disaster in a century has fueled geopolitical wars, and several new facts have emerged in recent months to address this question.
Scientist Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracking the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, found timeline inconsistencies by scanning what had already been made public in medical journals and video interviews with people at a Chinese news outlet. It is believed to have the first two documented infections.
Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ links to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.
Dr. “In this city of 11 million, half of the early cases are linked to a place the size of a football field,” Worobey said. “If the epidemic didn’t start in the market, it becomes very difficult to explain this pattern.”
Many experts, including one of the pandemic investigators selected by the WHO, Dr. He said Worobey’s detective work was solid and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood seller.
But some also said the evidence is still insufficient to definitively resolve the larger question of how the pandemic started. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “zero patient” some time before the vendor’s case, and then reached critical mass to spread widely in the market. Studies on changes in the genome of the virus, including those made Dr. by Worobey himself — they suggested that the first infection occurred roughly in mid-November 2019, weeks before the seller fell ill.
“I disagree with the analysis,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “However, I disagree that none of the data is strong or complete enough to confidently say anything, except that the Huanan Seafood Market is clearly a super-spread event.”
Dr. Bloom also noted that it is not the first time that the WHO report, prepared in collaboration with Chinese researchers, has contained errors, including errors involving potential links of early patients to the market.
“In all these cases, it’s mind-blowing that there are inconsistencies in when this happens,” he said.
‘The Wrong Lies There’
Towards the end of December 2019, doctors at several Wuhan hospitals noticed mysterious cases of pneumonia emerging in people working at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. damp and poorly ventilated area where seafood, poultry, meat and wild animals are sold. On 30 December, public health officials told hospitals to report new market-related cases.
Fear of recurrence of SARS appeared In 2002, Chinese authorities from Chinese animal markets ordered the Huanan market to be closed, and Wuhan police officers close January 1, 2020. Despite these measures, new cases have increased in Wuhan.
Wuhan authorities said On 11 January 2020, the cases began on 8 December. defined The earliest patient, a Wuhan resident with the surname Chen, fell ill on 8 December and had no connection to the market.
Chinese officials and some outside experts suspected that the initial high percentage of market-related cases might be a statistical coincidence known as detection bias. They concluded that the December 30 call from authorities to report market-related diseases may have led doctors to overlook other cases without such ties.
“Initially, we assumed that there might be the new coronavirus in the seafood market,” said Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. said in May 2020According to the China Global Television Network. “But now it turns out that the market is one of the victims.”
by spring 2020, senior members The Trump administration did encourage Another scenario for the origin of the pandemic: the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has a campus along the Yangtze River, about eight miles from the Huanan market.
In January of this year, researchers selected by WHO visited China and met with an accountant who reportedly developed symptoms on 8 December. March 2021 report described it as the first known case.
But Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at the EcoHealth Alliance, who is part of the WHO team, said Dr. He said he was convinced that Worobey’s analysis was wrong.
Dr. “The eighth appointment that December was a mistake,” Daszak said.
NS The WHO team said it never asked the accountant the date on which her symptoms started. Instead, the date was given for December 8 by doctors from Hubei Xinhua Hospital, who handled other early cases but ignored Mr. Chen. “So that’s where the fault lies,” said Dr. Daszak.
According to WHO experts, Dr. The interview was a dead end, Daszak said: The accountant had no obvious connection to a market, laboratory, or mass meeting. He told them that he likes to spend time on the Internet and run, and that he does not travel much. Dr. “It was as vanilla as you can get,” Daszak said.
Dr. Daszak said that if the team had identified the seafood seller as the first known case, they would have followed up more aggressively with questions like what stall he was working at and where his products came from.
This year Dr. Daszak became one of the strongest critics of the era. lab leak theory. He and his organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, have welcomed research collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last monthThe National Institutes of Health said it violated the terms and conditions of EcoHealth’s grant for coronavirus research in bats.
Doctors at Hubei Xinhua Hospital said the onset of the accountant’s illness was December 8, while a senior doctor at the Wuhan Central Hospital, where Mr. Chen was being treated, said: told a Chinese news source He said he developed symptoms around December 16.
Asked about Mr. Chen’s case, China’s National Health Commission said it stood by the comments made by Liang Wannian, the leader of the Chinese side of the WHO-China investigation, who oversaw the interview with the doctors of Hubei Xinhua Hospital. Mr. Liang a press conference in February The earliest Covid case this year showed symptoms on December 8 and was “not tied” to the Huanan market.
Errors and Inconsistencies
in them reportWHO experts concluded They were unable to confirm that the virus most likely spread to humans from an animal spread, but that the source was the Huanan market. In response, they said a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
The report has come under fire for various errors and omissions. Washington post clarified In July, it was noted that the report listed false viral samples for several early patients, including the first official case, and mistakenly linked the first cluster of family cases to the Huanan market. WHO has promised to fix bugs, but they remain in the report on the organization’s website. (The organization said it would ask the authors of the report what and how they would fix the errors.)
In May, two months after the publication of the report by WHO and China, 18 famous scientistsDr. Worobey responded with a letter in the journal Science complaining that the WHO team paid little attention to the theory of the lab leak. They argued that much more research is needed to determine whether one explanation is more likely than the other.
An expert on origins flu and HIV, Dr. Worobey tried to piece together the early days of the Covid pandemic. read May 2020 study From the first cases written by local doctors and health officials in Wuhan, he was surprised to see a description similar to Mr. Chen: a 41-year-old man who had no contact with the Huanan market. But the study’s authors dated their symptoms to December 16, not December 8.
Then Dr. Worobey found what appeared to be a second, independent source for later history: Mr. Chen himself.
“On the 16th, I had a fever during the day,” said a man identified as Mr. Chen. March 2020 video interview with Paper, Shanghai-based publication. The video shows that Mr. Chen is a 41-year-old employee. he was in the financial office of a company and never went to the Huanan market. Official reports He said he lives in Wuhan’s Wuchang district, miles away from the market.
The New York Times was unable to independently verify the identity of the man in the video.
Mr. Chen said that on December 16, he felt a tightness in his chest with his fever and went to the hospital that day. “Even without strenuous exercise, with a little effort, like the way I’m talking to you now, I’m short of breath,” he said.
Dr. Worobey said the medical records shown in the video could hold clues to how the WHO-China report ended up with the wrong date. One page described the surgery that required Mr. Chen’s teeth to be removed. Another was a prescription for antibiotics on December 9, referring to a fever the previous day, possibly the day of dental surgery.
In the video, Mr. Chen speculated that he might have contracted Covid “when I went to the hospital”, possibly referring to his previous dental surgery.
Washington post noted In July, details provided by WHO for the 8 December case login From an online database of viral samples linked to someone who fell ill on December 16. In response, WHO said it was investigating the discrepancy.
An agency spokesperson told The New York Times that “it would be difficult to comment” on the first known case, as the WHO team had limited access to health data. He said it’s important that researchers continue to look for previously infected patients.
Dark Links
In Worobey’s revised chronology, the earliest case is not Mr. Chen, but a seafood seller named Wei Guixian, who developed symptoms around December 11. symptoms began on December 11 and Wall Street Journal She said she started feeling sick on December 10. The WHO-China report listed the market-linked December 11 case.)
Dr. Worobey found that hospitals had reported more than a dozen possible cases before December 30, when Wuhan officials warned doctors to seek contact with the market.
It determined that Wuhan Central Hospital and Hubei Xinhua Hospital each had recognized seven unexplained cases of pneumonia that would be confirmed as Covid-19 before December 30. Four out of seven cases at each hospital were market-related.
Dr. Worobey argued that by focusing only on these cases, detection bias could rule out the possibility of skew the results in favor of the market.
Still, other scientists said it’s far from certain that the pandemic started on the market.
A virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Dr. “It has done an excellent job of reconstructing what it can do from the available data, and it’s as plausible as any hypothesis,” said W. Ian Lipkin. “But I don’t think we’ll ever know what’s going on because it’s been two years and it’s still dark.”
Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and most vocal advocates While investigating a lab leak, he said only new details on earlier cases – by November – will help scientists trace the origin.
“The main point this points out,” he said, “is the lack of access to data and errors in the WHO-China report.”
Eleanor Goodman contributed to the translation and Liu Yi contributed to the research.
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