Solders Returning from the Wuhan Military Games in Oct 2019 Seeded the World with COVID-19 Without Which a Pandemic Might Have Been Averted

Abstract. The Wuhan Military Games (WMG) were conducted from October 18-27, 2019, in Wuhan, China. Officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games, 第七届世界军人运动会, this was the first international military multisport event to be held in China. The event was also the nation’s largest military sports event ever with 9,308 athletes from 109 countries competing in 329 events and 27 sporting disciplines. The multisport event included 25 official and two demonstrative sports. Six sport disciplines such as badminton, tennis, table tennis, women's boxing, and men's gymnastics made their debuts in the event. Around 230,000 volunteers were recruited for the event.

If SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Wuhan at that time, athletes would become infected and upon return to their native countries, would begin to infect local residents. This would begin to trigger the natural “molecular clock” that produces mutations at a rate of about 25.5 per year. Countries that did not send athletes to the Games would not experience this early seeding and instead would have a lower mutation incidence in their earliest cases. I thus compared the mutation rate for early cases in countries that sent athletes with those countries that did not send athletes.

Null hypothesis: there is no difference in mutation rates in early cases from countries that sent athletes to the WMG from countries that did not send athletes.

Twenty-nine countries that sent athletes to the games and had residents with the earliest genome sequences in the GISAID database were examined. They had a range of 2-30 mutations, an average of 10.1 mutations (95% CI: 8.3-12.0) compared to the SARS-CoV-2 reference sequence (NC_045512.2). Twelve countries that did not send athletes to the games had residents with early cases that had a range of 1-5, and an average of only 2.9 mutations (95% CI: 2.1-3.7). The p-value for these two sets of data is 3.32×10^-8, a highly significant difference.

The null hypothesis is thus strongly rejected.

The alternative hypothesis is thus established, with an average of 7.2 more mutations in the countries with WMG participants than those countries without athletes. Using a molecular clock speed of 25.5 mutations per year[1] this places the beginning of the non-WMG countries spread about 103 days after the games or around February 7, 2020. Feb 6, 2019 WHO announced 28,276 cases in 25 countries.[2]

Had China informed the world SARS-Co-2 was circulating during the military games a pandemic probably would have been averted.

The December 2019 Hunan Seafood Market cases did not seed the pandemic.