Virologists claiming SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at multiple markets are, imo, unintentionally, participating in a disinformation campaign.
It has been repeatedly clarified that the market the earliest "known" covid case visited was a Walmart-equivalent RT-mart. Not a wet market.
Please see page 38 of the China-WHO annexes.
This superstore market that the first case was brutally exposed to was *GASP* in the same district as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
who.int/docs/default-s…
Yet, journalists are still reporting misinformed experts as saying that they're stunned that a lab escape virus would make its way to a market/superstore.
Do some scientists no longer buy their own groceries? How do you expect Wuhan scientists to get food to cook and eat?
If experts continue to be stunned by why so many early cases were linked to markets, please take a good look at the criteria used to identify early cases in December 2019/early January 2020.
Page 161 China-WHO joint study annexes.
At the time, a superspreading event had occurred at Huanan Seafood Market. Unsurprisingly, investigators raced to track cases linked to Huanan. Without a link to the Huanan market, cases were only considered if they exhibited 3 severe pneumonia symptoms - favoring the elderly.
This is corroborated by the map (has errors!) of December 2019 cases in Wuhan. The home addresses of patients colocalizes with where the elderly were concentrated in Wuhan.
ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-…
Compare left (figure from Holmes et al. preprint, they didn't have access to data so used Adobe Illustrator to reverse engineer China-WHO figure) and right (population density in b, elderly density in e).
From the reports of the earliest Covid cases in Wuhan, it's straightforward that what we were seeing were not the earliest cases. Even WHO said so to the Washington Post...
"WHO spokesman, said.. the question of where the first-known patient lived relative to the river was not relevant to competing hypotheses about the origin of the virus.. because “the current first known patient is most probably not the first case.”"
washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
I look forward to debunking the multi-market myth on the AAAS panel in ~36 hours.
I'll try and muster my best facepalm.
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