WHO FINDS SIGNS OF COVID OUTBREAK EVEN BEFORE DECEMBER 2019

Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought, Nick Paton Walsh reported for CNN.

The lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December.

The team also had a chance to speak to the first patient Chinese officials said had been infected, an office worker in his 40s, with no travel history of note, reported infected on December 8. Embarek said China has yet to respond favorably to a demand by researchers to have access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from Wuhan in 2019 for a more comprehensive study.

Earlier reports from Wuhan described the outbreak of pneumonia-like ailments in November 2019 as a “pneumonia plague” while doctors like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, who broke the news of the COVID outbreak, noted the disease was worse than pneumonia.

The WHO food safety specialist added the team had been presented by Chinese scientists with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in December 2019. Of these 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests, he said, and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient's symptoms.

Ben Embarek said it was possible this larger number -- of likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on -- meant the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that December.

"We haven't done any modeling of that since," he said. "But we know ...in big ballpark figures... out of the infected population, about 15% end up severe cases, and the vast majority are mild cases."

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