The agency confirmed that the earliest official case, Patient S01, was a 41-year-old man, with virus genome sequences EPI_ISL_403930, MT019531, and GWHABKH00000001 in various databases. The report had listed a different sequence, belonging to a 61-year-old man, which Jasarevic called an editing error.
Jasarevic said the WHO is still looking into why the official China National Genomics Data Center (NGDC) database says Patient S01 began to exhibit symptoms on Dec. 16, 2019, a week later than the Dec. 8 onset recorded in the WHO report.
The lack of clarity on Patient S01 introduces the possibility that the earliest official case could have been someone different, with the WHO report mentioning a Huanan market seafood vendor and others who began exhibiting symptoms before Dec. 16.
The WHO, however, also clarified that the first family cluster of infections in Wuhan had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market, although a woman in the group had been to other markets. The report previously gave conflicting information in different sections about the family’s links to the market.
Jasarevic said sequence IDs will be corrected for two other patients in the report. S05 was a 61-year-old man who died, with genome sequence EPI_ISL_403928, and S11 was a 52-year-old woman with sequence EPI_ISL_403929, he said.