Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesman, said in an email that the agency cannot comment on what the Wuhan government announced last year, but the question of where the first-known patient lived relative to the river was not relevant to competing hypotheses about the origin of the virus. The issue is not important, he wrote, because “the current first known patient is most probably not the first case.”

Source: Washington Post July 15, 2021 09:02 UTC