Wuhan: All these months, an accountant based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan was thought to be the first identified COVID-19 case.
A new study, however, says that a vendor at a seafood market in Wuhan was the first one to have contracted coronavirus.
The study, published in the Science journal, lends support to the belief that COVID-19 is an animal-origin disease.
Earlier, many felt that the virus may have leaked from a virus laboratory in Wuhan, believed to be the first epicentre of the pandemic.
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But according to virologist Michael Worobey, who conducted the study, the first known case of COVID-19 is a female vendor at the market, rather than a male accountant as identified earlier.
“His (the accountant’s) symptom onset came after multiple cases in workers at Huanan market, making a female seafood vendor there the earliest known case, with illness onset on December 11,” according to Worobey, the head of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of Arizona.
Worobey has said that community transmission of coronavirus disease started at the market.
“Given the high transmissibility of Sars-CoV-2 and the high rate of asymptomatic spread, many symptomatic cases would inevitably soon lack a direct link to the location of the pandemic’s origin,” he wrote.
The US and several other countries have repeatedly blamed China for the COVID-19 pandemic. But the Chinese government has continued to deny the lab leak theory, calling it a conspiracy.
