Thread by @alexandrosM

This is a thread to collect all early knowledge western scientists had of the outbreak in Wuhan. I want to try to understand any pattern of information spread that can be extracted, if there's something there.

Ron Fouchier, Deputy Head of the Erasmus MC department of Viroscience in the Netherlands, claims to have known about the virus during the first week of December 2019:

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1405553117844819973

Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance claims to have known about the outbreak in "late December 2019". onezero.medium.com/a-free-email-s…

Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, claims to have received a call by George Gao on New Year's Eve 2020:

https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson/status/1404005637000896515

W. Ian Lipkin, Director of the Center for Infection & Immunity at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health told Rolling Stone that a source in China told him about an outbreak of a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan in mid-December 2019 rollingstone.com/politics/polit…

Importantly, Lipkin also reports getting a call from Gao on New Year's Eve 2020, just like Farrar: bbc.com/news/world-557…

Marjorie Pollack, deputy editor of ProMED, got a message from "a frequent and reliable contributor" on December 30, a day earlier than Gao's calls to Farrar and Lipkin. She posted it on the list, alerting many all over the world: promedmail.org/promed-post/?i…

wired.com/story/how-prom…

Importantly, both Pollack and Daszak point to chatter on Chinese social media, in particular Pollack points to a specific post on Weibo.

Dr. Robert Redfield, then-head of the US CDC, heard about the outbreak "around New Year's Eve". In a conversation with Gao "days later" (which we know from elsewhere is Jan 3rd), Gao broke down in tears. web.archive.org/web/2020032817…

More precise source on Redfield: "I did get notified from our CDC China office on New Year's Eve that there was a cluster of cases of unspecified pneumonia in Wuhan, China, that seemed to be linked to a seafood market." pbs.org/wgbh/frontline…

This is likely the first media posting, also on December 31st, about Hong Kong's reaction to the outbreak. scmp.com/news/china/pol…

This is from Reuter's but I'm starting to think we're getting into timezone issues. The timestamp is almost identical to the one from PROmed, just 4 minutes earlier. While it says "December 30th", it must have been December 31st already in China. reuters.com/article/us-chi…

Ok, this adds significant new info: The photo below is of official document by health authorities in Wuhan, issued on the 30th, and leaked to Weibo and WeChat on the 31st. This is probably the leak that set everything else in motion. taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3847781

As far as I can tell, the sequence is as follows
Wuhan internal documents ->
Weibo leak ->
Taiwan picks up chatter ->
WHO, PROmed tip, ChinaCDC ->
Wuhan official announcement of 27 cases ->
PROmed & Reuters public post

Only then did Gao call Farrar, Lipkin and Redfield.

This means Daszak was being deceptive when he said they knew in "late December" when in fact they picked it up quite likely on the same day as everyone else (surprise!)

This leaves only Fouchier and Lipkin publicly stating that they knew of some kind of outbreak by the first week (Fouchier) and middle (Lipkin) of December 2019. Would be interesting to find others, but it seems every other mention we have is downstream from the Weibo leak.

There is always of course the chance that either or both are being untruthful to seem more like "insiders" than they are. While we can't rule that out without public traces of their earlier knowledge, it's probably best to take them at face value until more is known.

By the way, I have a Taiwan -> WHO link in my network above, and it may not be clear why. In a row with Tedros a few months later, Taiwan actually released their email warning the WHO right here on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MOHW_Taiwan/status/1248915057188024320

According to Caixin Global, by December 27, "a Guangzhou-based genomics company had sequenced most of the virus from fluid samples from the lung of a 65-year old deliveryman who worked at the seafood market" and saw similarity to SARS. outline.com/bnnaRU

AP identifies this genomics company as Vision Medicals and claims to have independent validation from Caixin. apnews.com/article/united…

It appears that that report triggered a number of other samples to be sent, and Capital Bio Medicals was the first to confirm the news everyone feared. From there we get to WeChat and from there to Li Wenliang, the hero of the early phase of COVID-19. bbc.com/news/world-557…

These few items assemble the earlier part of the graph:
Wuhan [Central?] Hospital ->
Vision Medicals ->
Wuhan Central Hospital ->
Capital Bio Medicals ->
Emergency Dept head of Wuhan Central Hospital ->
WeChat ->
Li Wenliang ->
100s of university classmates -?>
Weibo -> (etc)

Admittedly this has become a bit of an all-around tracing of the spread and identification of SARS-CoV-2, but in retrospect it's impossible to know which scientists had non-trivial heads up without knowing the background of what was known by others.

For any readers seeing in particular my arrow charts, please take into account that I'm piecing together disparate reports from the media, and while they all seem to fit, any error in any of them may throw my assumptions completely off. The diagrams are as good as their sources.

If you are aware of any bits of known info please share either as a reply or a dm. If something is relevant and it isn't here I likely haven't seen it, so please share.

A cluster of September-October puzzle pieces has emerged, but I'll record them in a separate thread, in a desperate attempt to keep this thread focused on late December:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1409277980912672768?s=20