Arthur Greene
Who was the first person to catch Covid-19?
The answer to that question will help tell us what caused the pandemic that has killed 3.5-million people and brought the world to its knees.
That question has become increasingly uncertain since the virus first came to public attention.
The first confirmed case of Covid-19 dates back to 8 December 2019 in Wuhan, China. But patient zero, the very first person to be infected with Covid-19, remains unknown. And some scientists think people might have been infected with it as early as September.
For the past year, it has been thought that the virus originated in a seafood market in Wuhan.
According to this theory, the virus was passed from a bat to another unidentified animal which in turn passed it on to a human.
However, US President Joe Biden confronted growing doubts surrounding this theory on Wednesday, when he ordered a reinvestigation into the origins of Covid-19.
According to his statement, a significant number of US officials now believe that the virus in fact emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, possibly from a leak.
The theory first emerged in April 2020, when US State Department telegrams came to light showing that Chinese embassy officials were concerned about biosecurity at the Wuhan lab.
At first, mainstream media widely dismissed it as a conspiracy theory, largely because the far right were pushing it as part of an exercise in China bashing.
However, US intelligence officials recently reported that three workers at the Wuhan lab were admitted to hospital in November 2019, weeks before the first official case of Covid-19 was identified.
The Chinese government has fiercely rejected claims of the leak.
Its embassy in the US said on Thursday: “Smear campaigns and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing.”
An investigation carried out earlier this year by the World Health Organization concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a lab.
However, it has been reported that many of the scientists who carried out this investigation felt that valuable data was withheld from them by Chinese authorities. They felt their job was left unfinished.
