The hunt for 'Patient Zero'

Skin samples allegedly taken from 'Patient Zero' reveals a sign of COVID-19 is not from Wuhan?

By Edward Era Barbacena

A research team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) is currently studying the possible origin of COVID-19 from the case of a 25-year-old Italian woman.

He visited a Milan hospital with complaints of sore throat and skin lesions in November 2019, a month before COVID-19 was finally identified in Wuhan, China.

The study, published in January 2021, found skin samples 'left behind' from the woman, and tested more than six months later. 

As a result, scientists assessed that this woman could be the first person to spread the Corona virus long before the first COVID-19 cluster exploded in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.

However, the problem is that the researchers do not know the identity of the woman.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported the hospital women were treated, namely Policlinico Milan and the University of Milan did not have details of his identity. 

Raffaele Gianotti, the dermatologist who treated him, died in March, just days before the WHO-led report emerged.

The researchers assessed that cases related to COVID-19 outside Wuhan could help strengthen the origin of the spread of the Corona virus.

To do this, the team also requested blood samples in several countries to be tested, starting from late 2019, for the presence of coronavirus antibodies.

Please note, the case of an Italian woman who is suspected of being patient zero for COVID-19 has antibodies to the Corona virus. A few months earlier, on November 10, 2019, a sample of the woman's skin was taken by Dr Gianotti.

Quoted from the Daily Mail, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Italy in early 2020, Dr Gianotti looked back through archived skin samples for traces of COVID-19.

He performed two tests on women's skin samples, both of which found spike protein and 'shell' protein but the samples were too degraded to carry out any further tests that were deemed important.

This test will allow Dr Gianotti to genetically sequence the virus, provide more definitive confirmation that the woman is indeed infected with COVID-19 and allow researchers to compare her with cases from China.

"I was disappointed for one thing only. That we couldn't confirm it with the other third technique," Massimo Barberis, co-author of Dr Gianotti's study, told the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Barberis points out that a woman's blood drawn in mid-2020 tested positive for antibodies, COVID-19 has hit northern Italy at the same time, creating the possibility that she may have contracted COVID-19 without symptoms sometime after November.

While the woman's identity remains a mystery, Dr Barberis said enthusiasm for finding out how the pandemic started is now waning among researchers as COVID-19 cases also decline in Europe.

"People are not interested," he told the Wall Street Journal.