What’s the difference between patient 1 and patient 0?

Question

I know this is probably a stupid question, but if patient 0 is the first person to be infected, then why aren’t they just patient 1?

In: Other

Answer 1

Because 0 is always the origin point. They didn’t catch that disease from someone else. They got it from another animal or that it mutated inside them. Thus they are patient 0 and the next patient is patient 1.

Answer 2

Think of the zero here as the number of times the disease has been transmitted from person to person.

Answer 3

Apparently it was actually a [Patient “O”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_case), not zero. The man, Gaëtan Dugas from “o”utside of California, was discovered to not even be the original case of AIDS. Someone misread the investigator’s notes and created the “Patient Zero” name.

Answer 4

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