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The researcher, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, has put together a painstaking timeline of all the known cases of SARS-Cov-2 before it was known a pandemic was starting.
He found many were in people who lived or worked near the market, the original suspected source of the pandemic, even if they didn’t have direct links to the market.
But as Chinese government officials sought to deflect blame, and as the Trump administration and, later, intelligence officials in the Biden administration, pointed to the possibility of a virology research lab in Wuhan, the picture has become muddled.
Worobey, who specializes in tracing the genetic evolution of viruses, has found considerable evidence that the virus arose in an animal, and did not start circulating until the end of 2019. He has published multiple studies on the probable origins of the virus. But he said he wanted to check his own theories against the real-life evidence from what was known about actual people with documented infections.
So he dove into the known cases. He says what he found strengthens the theory that the virus originated in animals sold in the market — much like the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 that infected 8,000 people before it was stopped.
One case especially stood out — that of a 41-year-old accountant who allegedly got sick on December 8, 2019 and who had no connection to the market. The case has been cited as evidence the pandemic must not have started at the market. Worobey found records that showed the man didn’t become ill with Covid-19 until later in December and that his December 8 problem was related to his teeth.
“This is corroborated by hospital records and a scientific paper that reports his COVID-19 onset date as 16 December and date of hospitalization as 22 December,” Worobey wrote in a commentary in the journal Science.
That would make a seafood vendor who worked at the market and who got sick December 11, 2019, the earliest documented case, Worobey said.
Other…
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Source : cnn
