A 55-year-old man became the first known person to contract COVID-19.
The unnamed man hailed from the Hubei province, where the virus was first recorded, according to the South China Morning Post.
That’s more than a month earlier than doctors noted cases in Wuhan, China, which is in Hubei province, at the end of December 2019.
At the time, authorities suspected the virus stemmed from something sold at a wet market in the city. However, it’s now clear that early in what is now a pandemic, some infected people had no connection to the market. That included one of the earliest cases from Dec. 1, 2019 in an individual who had no link to that seafood market, researchers reported Jan. 20 in the journal The Lancet.