Coronavirus may have started as a gastro bug, not at the seafood market in Wuhan, China
A seafood market in China’s city of Wuhan was first blamed for the global outbreak of the coronavirus. But now experts say it may not have been the cause as they hunt for Patient Zero.
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The deadly coronavirus which has infected over 34,000 people worldwide may have started out as a gastro bug.
It was also in circulation weeks before it entered the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan China, which was originally cited as the source of the outbreak.
The quest to find patient zero, the first person to contract the new virus, has revealed the first known case occurred in Wuhan on December 1.
This was 10-15 days before the first cases linked to the seafood market.
Chinese researchers reported in The Lancet that the December 1 patient had never been to the market and there is no evidence he passed it on to others.
The first case linked to the Huanan seafood market occurred on December 10, on that same date two other people who had never been to the market were also diagnosed.
Between December 1 and January 1 there were 27 cases connected to the market and 14 not connected to the market, the researchers found.
“The symptom onset date of the first patient identified was Dec 1, 2019. None of his family members developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they said in the Lancet article.
The first fatal case of coronavirus was a man called Mr Zeng — a 61 year old with liver disease who had continuous exposure to the market.
He died January 10 and five days later his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no exposure to the market, was hospitalised with coronavirus and pneumonia, the Lancet reported.
On December 30 an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital Li Wenliang, told his medical colleagues in a private chat that seven people had contracted what he believed to be SARS.
He was disciplined by government authorities and later contracted coronavirus himself.
He died on Friday.
Biologist Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute in the US who analysed coronavirus sequences to ascertain its origin has said it is possible someone infected outside the Huanan seafood market could have brought the virus to the market.
Experts are also considering the idea that the virus was spread by an infected animal, possibly a bat, at the market.
Andersen said his analysis of 27 genomes of the virus suggested they had a common source around October 1, 2019.
CSIRO scientists Dr Trevor Drew whose team is testing possible treatments for coronavirus at a lab in Geelong, Victoria said the real patient zero may have contracted the virus months before December as a gastro bug.
“We suspect it was maybe a disease of the intestines before it became a respiratory virus because you can isolate the virus from faeces,” he said.
“That’s very typical of a coronavirus and it does mirror SARS in being gastrointestinal,” he said.
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The crown-like spike protein which the virus uses to infect human cells may have mutated from ‘binding to gut cells’ to ‘binding to respiratory cells’, he said.
One of the first 41 patients in China had diarrhea as did a coronavirus patient treated in Washington in the US.
It is thought the virus originated in bats before transferring to humans.
Chinese researchers regularly test the viruses in that country’s bat population and sequencing of the new coronavirus shows it is very similar to a coronavirus found in bats in a Wuhan cave two years ago, the Doherty Institute’s Professor Sharon Lewin said.
Australian researchers at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne are already testing potential treatments on coronavirus samples they have grown in the lab and are preparing to test vaccines they are developing on the virus.
Hospitals in China are using an antiretroviral HIV treatment Kaletra drug in a randomised controlled trial in coronavirus patients.
Doctors in Thailand reported success after treating coronavirus patients with a combination of Tamiflu, a flu medication, and Kaletra.
Other possible treatments include Gilead Sciences’s remdesivir, a drug that was designed to treat ebola but which failed efficacy tests. It is now being trialled on coronavirus in China.
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), reported that a coronavirus patient treated with remdesivir in Washington improved after receiving the treatment.
Originally published as Coronavirus may have started as a gastro bug, not at the seafood market in Wuhan, China
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