Covid Patient Zero may have been a Wuhan lab worker, WHO chief says

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The first person to be infected by Covid-19 could have been a Wuhan laboratory employee who came into contact with a bat, a World Health Organisation chief has claimed.

Dr Peter Embarek led the WHO’s four-week investigation on the origins of coronavirus and originally claimed the theory the virus was from a lab in the city was “extremely unlikely”.

However Dr Embarek, an epidemiologist and food safety expert, has now said that a lab worker in Wuhan could have been infected by a bat.

He told Denmark Tv station TV2: “An employee who was infected in the field by taking samples falls under one of the probable hypotheses.

“This is where the virus jumps directly from a bat to a human. In that case, it would then be a laboratory worker instead of a random villager or other person who has regular contact with bats.

“So it is actually in the probable category”.

However, he added that the WHO team found no evidence that the Covid outbreak was linked to research that was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He stressed that WHO experts found no direct evidence that the coronavirus outbreak is related to the bat research conducted at Wuhan’s laboratories.

The origin of the virus remains hotly-contested among experts after the first known cases emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, however most specialists do not think a lab leak is the likely cause.

In May, US president Joe Biden ordered aides to find answers to questions over the origin, saying that US intelligence agencies were pursuing rival theories, including the possibility of a laboratory accident. China has consistently dismissed the lab leak theory.

Yuan Zhiming, the director of the biosafety lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, previously said they had not stored or studied the new coronavirus before the outbreak.

“I want to emphasise that .... the Wuhan Institute of Virology has never designed, made or leaked the novel coronavirus,” he said.

Additional reporting by agencies