Following the global outbreak of COVID-19, most media reports have focused only on the developments after the first confirmed case of the disease was recorded in China. Please note that we are talking about the first "reported" case, not the first case. Recent reports indicate that many patients outside of China were diagnosed with COVID-19 weeks before China confirmed its first case. This raises some reasonable questions: Who is patient zero of the novel coronavirus? When did it begin to spread? Let's take a look at some early COVID-19 cases.