> At the Union Hospital, Wei was told her sickness was "ruthless" and that many from Huanan Market had visited the hospital with matching symptoms.
How can she have been patient zero if other people before her had matching symptoms?
EDIT: It does actually say later in the article she might not really be patient zero. Which means they haven't found patient zero at all yet, just 27 people who got it really early.
If she developed symptoms earlier than they did, but went to the hospital later, it's not impossible. But they couldn't have reliable data about when she or the other early patients were infected; the pre-symptomatic period seems to vary a lot.
From the article: Though identified as ''patient zero'', Wei may not be the first person to have contracted coronavirus in China, the report said. A study in Lancet medical journal claims the first person diagnosed with COVID-19 was identified on December 1.
It feels like this was debunked a couple months ago. Following the citations on the Wikipedia article, there was a documented case on Dec 1 [1], 9 days before this woman developed a cold, and later Chinese government documents described a case on Nov 17 [2]. Trevor Bedford's genetic analysis of the virus indicates a zoonosis in late October or early November from which all human strains descend.
This article’s credibility is highly suspect. The source of this article appears to be unidentified “media reports”, so where are the media reports?
The names of the alleged “patient zero”, Wei Guixian, is followed by “as identified by The Wall Street Journal”, so I searched for “Wei Guixian site:wsj.com”, and the only result was a March 6 article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early... which, not surprisingly, is paywalled. So what has changed since March 6 that warrants this news article? The article doesn’t seem to point to any new research.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] threadHow can she have been patient zero if other people before her had matching symptoms?
EDIT: It does actually say later in the article she might not really be patient zero. Which means they haven't found patient zero at all yet, just 27 people who got it really early.
https://medicaldialogues.in/medicine/news/wuhan-shrimp-selle...
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
The names of the alleged “patient zero”, Wei Guixian, is followed by “as identified by The Wall Street Journal”, so I searched for “Wei Guixian site:wsj.com”, and the only result was a March 6 article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early... which, not surprisingly, is paywalled. So what has changed since March 6 that warrants this news article? The article doesn’t seem to point to any new research.