Corona Daily 031: Wrong Number

On 1 April 2020, I wrote an article called “patient zero”, the first patient to start the pandemic. American newspapers had confirmed Wei Guixian, a 57 year old lady selling shrimps as patient zero. The Chinese had not confirmed her name. Wei Guixian has not been mentioned since.

In January-February this year, a professional joint WHO-China study was conducted. An international team nominated by WHO visited China, and along with the Chinese scientists published a detailed 120 page report in April 2021.

Several journalists and scientists have since questioned WHO on the data and other contents of the report. WHO today confirmed the report included “unintended errors”. WHO will try to fix them by removing the discrepancies.

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The map in the WHO-China report shows the first case (patient zero) living on the western side of the Yangtze River. As a matter of fact, he lives on the eastern side of the river. The reports in Wuhan confirm this.

Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesman, said which side of the river the patient lived on is not relevant to the debate about natural or lab-leak origin of the virus. The patient’s wrong address is not important, he wrote, because anyway “the current first known patient is most probably not the first case”.

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In December 2019, a Chinese accountant fell ill. He didn’t go to Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market. He shopped at the sleek RT-Mart near his house on the eastern side of Yangtze. He had not left Wuhan for weeks before his illness. He had never visited a bat cave in his life. In the WHO report, the trail ends with this man, codenamed SO1, China’s first confirmed case. He was not a shrimp seller, bat hunter, or lab scientist. He was an accountant (surname Chen) who shopped at a very large supermarket. Mr Chen, So1, was the most scrutinized patient. He spoke to the WHO delegation during the visit.

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Each patient has a unique sample sequence ID. It is a long stream of digits that make no sense to anyone except the scientists.

Enigmatically, the ID of the first case in the WHO report doesn’t belong to the 41-year old Mr Chen, but to a 61-year old market worker. The 61 year old man had fallen ill on 20 December 2019, and within days died of septic shock. The Chinese databases clearly mention those facts.

WHO confirmed the first case was the 41 year old, and not the 61 year old man. WHO spokesman Jasarevic called it an editing error.

The other mystery is the date of the first case. The WHO report says he fell ill on 8 December. The Chinese databases say the date was 16 December. Jasarevic said the WHO will look into why the Chinese database varies from the WHO report.

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Jasarevic said sequence IDs will be corrected for other patients in the report as well. SO5 was a 61 year old man who died, and S11 was a 52-year old woman, he clarified. (The report has wrong genome sequences attributed to both). “All sequences will undergo thorough revision”, said the WHO spokesman. The numbers could have gone wrong during the continued process of submission and publishing, he added.

There is no clarity on who is responsible for the typos, the unintended errors and attributing wrong IDs to patients. The WHO? The Chinese? Or the team together? I wonder if the WHO-China team had any access to translators or interpreters.  

China’s National Health Commission and the Wuhan CDC did not respond to newspapers’ request for comment.

The Chinese embassy in Washington in a statement said that the origin study must follow science and can only be a joint scientific study. Any action that politicizes origin-tracing poisons the atmosphere of scientific research, hampers global co-operation in this regard, and undermines global efforts to fight the virus.

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President Biden has asked his intelligence services to investigate the lab-leak theory. He may want to add to the investigation the task of finding the real Patient Zero.

Ravi