Asked about Chen’s case, China’s National Health Commission said it stood by comments made by Liang Wannian, the leader of the Chinese side of the WHO-China investigation who led the interview with the Hubei Xinhua Hospital doctors. Liang told a news conference in February of this year that the earliest Covid case showed symptoms on Dec 8 and was “not connected” to the Huanan market.
Errors and Inconsistencies In their report, the WHO experts concluded that the virus most likely spread to people from an animal spillover, but they could not confirm that the Huanan market was the source. By contrast, they said that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely". In May, two months after the report by the WHO and China was published, 18 prominent scientists, including Worobey, responded with a letter in Science complaining that the WHO team had given the lab-leak theory short shrift. Far more research was required, they argued, to determine whether one explanation was more likely than the other. An expert on the origins of influenza and HIV, Worobey has tried to piece together the early days of the Covid pandemic. Reading a May 2020 study of early cases written by local doctors and health officials in Wuhan, he was puzzled to see a description that seemed like Chen: a 41-year-old man with no contact with the Huanan market. But the study’s authors dated his symptoms to Dec 16, not Dec 8. Then Worobey found what appeared to be a second, independent source for the later date: Chen himself. “I got a fever on the 16th, during the day,” a man identified as Chen said in a March 2020 video interview with The Paper, a publication based in Shanghai. The video indicates that Chen is a 41-year-old who worked in a company’s finance office and never went to the Huanan market. Official reports said that he lived in the Wuchang district in Wuhan, miles from the market. The New York Times was not able to independently confirm the identity of the man in the video. Along with his fever on Dec 16, Chen said he felt a tightness in his chest and went to the hospital that day. “Even without any strenuous exercise, with just a tiny bit of effort, like the way I’m speaking with you now, I’d feel short of breath,” he said. Worobey said that the medical records shown in the video might hold clues to how the WHO-China report wound up with the wrong date. One page described surgery Chen needed to have teeth removed. Another was a Dec 9 prescription for antibiotics referring to a fever from the day before — possibly the day of the dental surgery. On the video, Chen speculated that he might have gotten Covid “when I went to the hospital” — possibly a reference to his earlier dental surgery. Murky Links In Worobey’s revised chronology, the earliest case is not Chen but the seafood vendor, a woman named Wei Guixian, who developed symptoms around Dec 11. (Wei said in the same video published by The Paper that her serious symptoms began Dec 11, and she told The Wall Street Journal that she began feeling sick on Dec 10. The WHO-China report listed a Dec 11 case linked to the market.) Worobey found that hospitals reported more than a dozen likely cases before Dec 30, the day Wuhan authorities alerted doctors to be on the lookout for ties to the market. He determined that Wuhan Central Hospital and Hubei Xinhua Hospital each recognised seven cases of unexplained pneumonia before Dec 30 that would be confirmed as Covid-19. At each hospital, four out of seven cases were linked to the market. By focusing on just these cases, Worobey argued, he could rule out the possibility that ascertainment bias skewed the results in favour of the market. Still, other scientists said it’s far from certain that the pandemic began at the market. “He has done an excellent job of reconstructing what he can from the available data, and it’s as reasonable a hypothesis as any,” said Dr Ian Lipkin, a virus expert at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “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.” Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the most vocal proponents of investigating a lab leak, said that only new details about earlier cases — going back to November — would help scientists trace the origin. “The main issue this points out,” she said, “is that there’s a lack of access to data, and there are errors in the WHO-China report.”
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