Hunt for coronavirus ‘patient zero’ as shrimp seller at Wuhan food market fears she was among first infected
A SHRIMP seller at the infamous wet market in Wuhan where coronavirus is said to have started has been revealed as one of the first infected.
Wei Guixian, 57, has spoken to the as experts continue to hunt for the mysterious patient zero who started the outbreak.
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Ms Wei said she started to feel sick on December 10 and visited a small local clinic believing she had a cold before returning to market to serve customers – spreading the virus to countless others.
Eight days later she was critically ill in hospital becoming one of the first confirmed cases in a pandemic which has swept the world killing over 22,000 and infecting nearly half a million.
Ms Wei, who has recovered after leaving hospital in early January, believes she might have become infected via a toilet in the market she shared with wild meat sellers.
She says vendors on either side of her also contracted COVID-19 as well as others in her family including one of her daughters and niece.
HUNT FOR PATIENT ZERO
Doctors finally quarantined her in late-December after establishing the link between the crippling respiratory illness and the Hua’nan market.
The Chinese government did not publicly confirm the outbreak until January 9 after allowing a New Year celebration banquet in Wuhan to go ahead.
Ms Wei said if authorities had acted sooner “a lot fewer people would have died.”
The mysterious 'Patient Zero' remains a mystery although according to the government of Wuhan the first confirmed case was a person surnamed Chen who began showing symptoms on Dec 8.
Chen, who has fully recovered, denied visiting the wet market.
Theories around the outbreak include the virus originating in a bat before jumping to human via a wild animal, either living or dead, sold at Hua’nan.
Experts who have studied the data believe the killer bug could have jumped from a creature to a person as early as October or November.
What is known, is that by the second week of December several workers at the wet market were showing symptoms including fever, aching limbs and coughing.
A man from Hubei - the epicentre of coronavirus – was infected in November and could be patient zero, a bombshell report which emerged earlier in March says.
SPREAD ACROSS THE WORLD
The unnamed 55-year-old contracted COVID-19 on November 17 – weeks before it was previously believed to have infected humans, government data shows.
According to the , the Chinese government has identified 266 people who were infected in 2019.
However, the authorities in China only became aware that they were dealing with a new strain of virus in late December.
Before a whistleblower medic from Hubei alerted officials on Dec 27 up to five new cases were being reported in China each day, it has emerged.
It's thought that by finding Patient Zero their blood could act as a baseline from which to measure the virus' behaviour, characteristics and mutations.
Medical science journal The Lancet earlier this year published an update into the first known clinical reports of the virus.
A large group of Chinese researchers reported that 13 of the first 41 cases had no link to the seafood market in Wuhan.
Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, said: "The presumed rapid spread of the virus apparently for the first time from the Hua'nan seafood market in December did not occur.
"Instead the virus was already silently spreading in Wuhan, hidden among many other patients with pneumonia at this time of the year.
"The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace."
'IT CAME FROM BATS'
Imperial College London infectious diseases expert Neil Ferguson told that officials needed to prepare for the possibility that containing the epidemic might not be possible.
Bats remain the number one suspect for the origin of the disease, as the animals have a unique immune system which enables them to tolerate viruses.
Dr Lucey argued that human and animal specimens collected during 2018 and 2019 must be tested for the virus or its antibodies and all other animal markets must be put under observation.
"There might be a clear signal among the noise," he said.
The virus belongs to the same family as SARS which killed nearly 800 people between 2002 and 2003.
