Scientist claims first known COVID-19 case was Wuhan market vendor

A scientist claimed in a new report published Thursday that a female seafood vendor at the Huanan Market in Wuhan, China, was the first known case of COVID-19 instead of a male accountant who lived several miles away from the market, as has been previously reported.

Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, wrote in a piece published in the journal Science that a female seafood vendor who worked at the live animal market in Wuhan and became ill on Dec. 11, 2019, was likely the first known case of COVID-19.

Previously, the earliest known case of COVID-19 has been attributed to a 41-year-old male accountant who lived nearly 20 miles south of Huanan Market.

However, Worobey noted that the illness the man reportedly experienced on Dec. 8 was likely due to dental problems associated with baby teeth he had retained into adulthood and his actual COVID-19 symptoms began on Dec. 16, a few days after the vendor became ill.

“This indicates that he was infected through community transmission after the virus had begun spreading from Huanan Market,” wrote Worobey. “He believed that he may have been infected in a hospital (presumably during his dental emergency) or on the subway during his commute; he had also traveled north of Huanan Market shortly before his symptoms began.”

Worobey cited Chinese media reports that looked into the first known COVID-19 infections at the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market and posited that the vendor’s case predated the accountant’s.

As The New York Times reported, multiple experts including a WHO-appointed pandemic investigator endorsed Worobey’s piece, though some said that the evidence he presented was still not sufficient enough to definitively say how the pandemic began.

“He has done an excellent job of reconstructing what he can from the available data, and it’s as reasonable a hypothesis as any,” Columbia University virologist W. Ian Lipkin told the Times. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to know what’s going on, because it’s two years ago and it’s still murky.”