The first published clinical case series of the outbreak: 41 hospitalized patients in Wuhan with laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection, illness onset through 2 Jan 2020. Reports that 27 of 41 (66%) had direct exposure to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but that the earliest-onset patient in the series (onset 1 Dec 2019) had no reported market exposure — the original seed of the “first case unlinked to the market” puzzle that later work (Worobey 2021) revisited. Also gives the first clinical/epidemiological picture (symptoms, comorbidities, ICU admission, family clustering) used throughout the pandemic-origins literature.
relevance_note: founding clinical dataset behind essentially all downstream market-linkage-percentage and “first case” claims on both sides of the debate.