Over recent days the mainstream media have been vying with each other to reveal the identity of the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 “patient zero”.
According to The Guardian on June 1st:
In the UK, the first confirmed cases of coronavirus came on 31 January when two Chinese nationals staying in a hotel in York tested positive. But as the crisis has rolled on, and the virus’s range of distinctive symptoms become more widely known, many – some in letters to the Guardian – have asked themselves if they or their loved ones could have had it earlier.
The article reports that:
A day before the first confirmed fatality from coronavirus outside mainland China was reported on 2 February this year, the death of the influential guitarist and musician Andy Gill was announced. The 64-year-old, who fronted the post-punk band Gang of Four, died of pneumonia after two weeks in St Thomas’ hospital in London.
The trajectory of Gill’s illness, which took medics looking after him in January by surprise, is now familiar – sudden deterioration, low oxygen levels and organ failure. He had fallen sick after his band returned from a trip to China in late November.
Then on June 8th The Sunday Times published an article by their chief foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb describing her own Covid-19 like symptoms in early January and reporting that:
“Thousands of people have emailed me with classic Covid symptoms from late December and January,” said Professor Tim Spector, a leading epidemiologist at King’s College London, who runs the Covid-19 Symptom Study app to which 3.8 million people have signed up.
“Either there was another virus behaving in a similar way which has since disappeared or these were early cases.”
If so, why was it not reflected in a spike in hospital admissions or deaths? “That’s the medical mystery,” said Spector.
There were, he said, possible explanations. “People who got it were young and healthy and didn’t transfer it to the elderly, obese and so on. Many of those early cases were skiers coming back from holidays. Or the virus was in some way different and didn’t have that final stage which attacks the immune system.
Christina points out that:
Officially, the first case involving a Briton was Steve Walsh, 53, a businessman from Hove… On February 6 he was diagnosed and transferred to Guy’s Hospital in London.
Before suggesting that:
It now seems likely that Walsh was not the UK’s “patient zero”. A month earlier, Susannah Ford… had fallen ill after flying back from a skiing holiday in Austria. [She] became ill on January 6, two days after her return from a new year trip.
Ford had spent a week in the resort of Obergurgl, near the Italian border, with her husband and two teenage daughters, flying back into Gatwick on January 4. She was the only one in the family who fell ill and assumed it was something she had picked up on an earlier trip to Trinidad.
Last week Ford paid for a test that shows whether the patient’s blood contains the antibodies that form when a person successfully fights off the disease. It came back positive, confirming that she had had Covid-19, although not when.“I’m convinced it’s when I was ill in January,” she said. “I can’t prove it was then but I haven’t been ill since or come into contact with people with it.”
Is there any advance on early January? Not as far as I am aware in the UK, but there have been several reports that European athletes who attended the Military World Games in Wuhan, China in October 2019 fell ill with symptoms resembling those of Covid-19.
According to an article in The Times on May 8th:
A French athlete who fell ill after competing in Wuhan in October says she has been told by doctors that Covid-19 was the likely cause of her ailment.The claim by Élodie Clouvel, an Olympic silver-winning pentathlete, has bolstered speculation that the coronavirus may have been present in the Chinese city several weeks before it was declared and then carried around the world by those who had taken part in an international competition there.
However according to the Global Times on February 24th:
A Wuhan hospital clarified the clinical diagnoses of five foreign athletes at the 7th CISM Military World Games held in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province in October 2019, saying that they contracted malaria and were not infected by the novel coronavirus.
And what of the science? According to a paper published in “Infection, Genetics and Evolution” in early May:
We observe an estimated time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor, which corresponds to the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, of 6 October 2019–11 December 2019 (95% CIs). These dates for the start of the epidemic are in broad agreement with previous estimates performed on smaller subsets of the COVID-19 genomic data using various computational methods.
It seems that it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that several athletes brought the SARS-CoV-2 virus to Europe from Wuhan in late October 2019.