Scientists are hunting for a Chinese woman dubbed “Patient Su” who may be the first person to have contracted coronavirus.
The 61-year-old has reportedly been traced back to an address three miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some researchers believe the bug escaped in a lab leak.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist who works with online sleuth team DRASTIC as they conduct an independent probe into the origins of Covid, made the discovery.
The woman reportedly fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in November and was taken to the nearby Rongjun Hospital in Wuhan.
China has so far given December 8 to the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the date of its “earliest onset case”.
Demaneuf told the Mail on Sunday: “We were able to pinpoint the exact name, age and address of a very early suspected case nearly one month before the official first case.
“That address is right next to the subway line No 2 and also not far from a People’s Liberation Army hospital that treated some of the other earliest cases.”
(Image: REUTERS)
It comes as China faces mounting pressure to provide further details on the origins of the bug with British officials this week saying the lab leak theory is “feasible”.
Calls for a full World Health Organisation (WHO) investigation have now been renewed with President Joe Biden demanding a “redoubled” probe.
According to the Mail on Sunday, details about the mysterious “Patient Su” were revealed through a mistake made by a leading Chinese official.
They are said to have accidentally sent screengrab to a Chinese medical journal showing that the patient lived on Zhuodaoquan Street.
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
The street is close to Wuhan’s central testing labs as well as a subway network thought to have played a crucial role in spreading the virus among the city’s 11 million inhabitants.
Professor Yu Chuanhua, professor of biostatistics at Wuhan University, has also said that he has data on three people who fell ill before December.
China has faced widespread accusations of fiddling its statistics and misrepresenting its role in the early days of the pandemic.
Earlier this week Dominic Cummings said his former boss Boris Johnson was briefed as early as April 2020 on fears that the pandemic may have originally leaked from a lab.
It also emerged last week that some of the city’s lab staff had been admitted to hospital weeks before China admitted it was facing an outbreak.