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Chinese research lab denies rumours of links to first coronavirus patient
- Speculation that a woman supposedly at the institute is ‘patient zero’ is false, laboratory says
- Authorities maintain that the most likely source was a market in Wuhan
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A Chinese virus research institute located at the epicentre of a coronavirus outbreak has denied links to the first patient diagnosed with the disease, amid speculation about the source of the virus.
In a statement on Sunday, the Wuhan Institute of Virology denied that one of its employees was the outbreak’s “patient zero”.
“Recently there has been fake information about Huang Yanling, a graduate from our institute, claiming that she was patient zero in the novel coronavirus,” the institute said.
It said it had verified that the claim was not true.
It said Huang was a graduate student at the institute until 2015, when she left the province and had not returned since. Huang was in good health and had not been diagnosed with disease, it added.
The disease, now known as Covid-19, has sickened some 60,000 people around the world and killed more than 1,500, most of them in Hubei province in central China.
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