About 90 people ended up in a Chinese hospital in October 2019 with symptoms similar to those of COVID-19. This is reported by the WHO team that spent the last month researching the origin of the virus in the country, the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.
Beijing officially reported that a patient with COVID-19 was first discovered on December 8, 2019. If the WHO team’s suspicions are correct, the ‘first corona patient identified’ in the Chinese city of Wuhan may not have been the first after all.
WHO experts, including the Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, spent the last four weeks doing research in China to find out the origin of COVID-19. That team concluded Tuesday that a food market in Wuhan may not be where COVID-19 came from after all.
According to China, which recently examined the 92 patients from October 2019, no antibodies to the virus were found in two-thirds of them. A third refused to cooperate or has since died. However, the WHO team says this may be explained by the delay between hospitalization and testing.
The experts have now asked the country for blood samples from Hubei Province, in which Wuhan is located, from the fall of 2019, to see if the virus was already circulating at the time. However, the Chinese authorities say they have not yet received the necessary authorization, because those samples are stored in blood banks.
‘Virus already circulated outside of China before December 2019’
Should it indeed be the case that patients with COVID-19 were in hospital as early as October 2019, this could explain why some scientists suspect that the virus was already circulating in Europe and the US as early as November and December 2019.
Earlier detection could have prevented further spread. Worldwide, more than 2.3 million people have now died from the consequences of a COVID-19 infection. Nearly 110 million people were infected.
Beijing has suggested in recent months that the corona virus originated outside China. For example, the country claims that the virus was hitched away via frozen food and had already been discovered in other countries. That scenario is still under investigation.
Dominic Dwyer, one of the experts on the research team, said on Tuesday that it will likely take years to fully understand the origins of the coronavirus.
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