Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic

Project Description

The question of the origin of COVID-19 is of great importance to humanity as we seek to understand how the pandemic emerged and how to prevent future pandemics caused by similar viruses.  In July 2022, a paper by Michael Worobey and his collaborators, published in 'Science', garnered global media attention.  It presented statistical arguments to support the zoonosis hypothesis and to pinpoint the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan as the pandemic's origin.  However, the quality of the data used in this paper was seriously criticised by researchers.  Our work, published in the 'Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society),' was the first study to expose the fundamental flaws in their statistical methods.  They first excluded everywhere except the Seafood Market as a possible epicentre and then compared the pattern of the locations of the 155 confirmed COVID-19 cases in early December 2019 with simulated patterns of cases following the population density of the whole Wuhan City.  It is, however, statistically trivial that the latter could not represent the pattern of the early stage of any pandemic.  However, Worobey and his collaborators considered that the significant difference found in their comparison could provide strong evidence supporting the zoonosis hypothesis and consequently concluded that the Seafood Market must be the epicentre, as they believed there was no other place possible to be the epicentre.  Contrary to their flawed methods based on unsound beliefs, our geostatistical analysis, based solely on the locations of the same 155 cases, reveals that the spatial centre of these cases is significantly far from the Seafood Market, leading to the conclusion that the question of the pandemic's origin remains unanswered.  Our findings gained public attention through feature articles in major media outlets, such as 'Newsweek' (https://www.newsweek.com/covid-market-origins-hypothesis-challenged-statisticians-1862075) and 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung'. (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/medizin-ernaehrung/wo-der-corona-ursprung-wirklich-lag-fruehere-analysen-in-kritik-geraten-19476294.html)

Project Investigator

Professor CHIU Sung Nok (Department of Mathematics)

Project Collaborator

Professor Dietrich Stoyan (Institut für Stochastik, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany)

Health and Drug Discovery

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