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Comment by rimliu | Hacker News Reader

Our media is referring to "patient zero" in Italy as a 38 years-old man. So either he is known or our media is full of your-know-that. Which would not be surprising.

Edit: a commenter below correctly pointed out that that 38yo man is being referred to as "patient one" not "patient zero". My bad.

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That 38 year old man was the one I talked about above, the person who went to the hospital on whom they first found the disease, but not necessarily the person it originated from. Likely they have asked him (as well as anyone else affected) whether he's been outside of the country and he answered no (otherwise they'd say they have found the origin).

I'm not an expert, so I looked up what "Patient Zero" is defined as. Wikipedia [1] defines it as the case that has been detected first, but also says that media has used the term to refer to the source of the disease. So the Italian media's use actually matches the Wikipedia definition, while my use in the post above, as in this CNN post [2] matches the other definition. Sadly the term is a bit vauge.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_case

[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/23/europe/italy-novel-corona...

Well, then our media is wrong.

I just read a CNN article entitled “Italy has yet to identify the source of its outbreak”, apparently from 8 minutes ago, citing a regional official.

https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-...

Things are developing very fast, expect that distortions from the chinese wispers games that is modern media to be worse than ever.

I've seen report that the first case was in contact with a person that had been in China but showed not symptoms and even might have tested negative at some point. If they get re-tested and show positive now, or some of their possessions do, that solves the mystery.

Dutch media reported yesterday that this person (who had been in China and had dinner with the 38 year old "patient 1") still tested negative on a second test, so the search for the real patient zero continued.

Didn't China changed how they were confirming cases to an MRI scan as people were still testing negative on tests 2-5 before testing positive.

Yes, but the problem with using that in this context is that an MRI scan can't fully distinguish COVID from other severe respiratory infections. It definitely won't work on someone who's asymptomatic.

I've been reading la Repubblica a lot today since I live pretty close to where the disease is spreading. They always reiterated that patient 0 who started spreading the virus in Italy is not yet identified. They had a "suspicious" person identified but that person later on was tested negative.

I think they're referring to him as "patient one". Patient zero (i.e. someone who is or was ill and has recently come back from China) hasn't been found yet.

Why does it have to be China? Couldn't it be Thailand/Singapore/S.Korea/Japan/Israel/Iran etc?

True, that would have been more correct. However, keep in mind that these people who are found ill now in Italy probably have contracted the virus weeks ago, before it started spreading substantially to other countries. Or before we knew it was already spreading anyway.

I'm strongly skeptical. Current research suggest mean incubation time is 5 days and stddev is 2 days. That means most cases will be asymptomatic within a week. Clearly, there were cases in the countries I listed above ~10 days ago, except Israel and maybe Iran was still in its infancy. The >20 days incubation time we see in news seems sensational and there is no research to back it up, except one non-peer-review paper published a few weeks ago.

Udik should have used e.g. rather than i.e.

You are correct. And to clarify further: I was talking about Lithuanian media, not the Italian one.

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