Re-examines the original medical records, hospital archives and interview data behind the WHO mission’s early-case list. Corrects the reported symptom-onset date of the presumed “first case” — an accountant with no market exposure, originally dated 1 Dec 2019 — to 16 Dec 2019 (the 1 Dec date traced to a mistaken assumption in a family member’s recollection), and dates the Huanan market seafood vendor Wei Guixian’s onset to 11 Dec 2019. That makes the market vendor, not the market-unlinked accountant, the earliest known symptomatic case. Reframes the widely repeated “the first case had no market link” claim as a data/recall artifact rather than a genuine early non-market case.
relevance_note: the primary reanalysis underlying the “market vendor was patient zero, not the unlinked accountant” claim central to the first-case/earliest-onset dispute; directly upstream of the geospatial case-map paper (Worobey 2022).