For a disease that has gripped the entire world in an unprecedented manner, surprisingly little is known about its first patient. To begin with, it’s not clearly established who that person is. The identity of the one believed to be the first patient is difficult to establish, and there have been various studies coming out of Europe that show early strains popping up there earlier than December 2019.

The WHO-China joint report of inquiry [https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus] does mention this patient, identified as ‘S01’, but has little further information. He was an accountant surnamed Chen who shopped at a very large supermarket, according to this report. It is surprising, that this man had little to do with the obvious risk points – the seafood market or the Wuhan lab from where the coronavirus would have escaped. He told the WHO experts that he had fallen ill on December 8, 2019.

But the sample sequence ID for ‘S01’ listed in the WHO report, “EPI_ISL_403928”, turns out to belong to someone else in the China’s National Center for Bioinformation Database [https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ncov/genome/accession?q=GWHABKJ00000001] – this someone else is a 61-year-old market worker who died in December 2019. Reports say the profile of S01 better matches that of a 41-year-old, who was diagnosed with coronavirus infection in the December-end. That patient, however, according to the Chinese database, fell ill on December 16. The WHO is now looking into this discrepancy.

China had granted only restricted access to the database even for the WHO team that visited Wuhan earlier this year, making it next to impossible to establish with surety the identity of the first patient.

Mystery does not end there. A four-year-old boy had fallen ill even before S01 – in Milan, and his oral swab tested positive for coronavirus many months later. His case belatedly showed [https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article] that the virus might have circulated undetected even outside China for considerable period before infections started to get noticed. In other words, S01 might not be the first patient. French researchers have found antibodies in samples dating back to November 2019. Then there are Italian researchers reporting traces from September 2019. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0300891620974755]

Also see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/covid-pandemic-origin-wuhan-lab/2021/07/07/41fbbf9e-d560-11eb-b39f-05a2d776b1f4_story.html

https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200423-sitrep-94-covid-19.pdf