First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources
Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn&#x27;t really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren&#x27;t actually that rare, and there&#x27;s a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I&#x27;ve talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they&#x27;re talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance.<p>It&#x27;s really unfortunate that there isn&#x27;t some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that&#x27;s regularly sampling the world&#x27;s population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren&#x27;t <i>technically</i> allowed to do it. Ideally we&#x27;d have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it&#x27;s needed.