  The centrality of Wuhan's Huanan market in maps of December 2019 COVID-19
case residential locations, established by Worobey et al. (2022a), has recently
been challenged by Stoyan and Chiu (2024, SC2024). SC2024 proposed a
statistical test based on the premise that the measure of central tendency
(hereafter, "centre") of a sample of case locations must coincide with the
exact point from which local transmission began. Here we show that this premise
is erroneous. SC2024 put forward two alternative centres (centroid and mode) to
the centre-point which was used by Worobey et al. for some analyses, and
proposed a bootstrapping method, based on their premise, to test whether a
particular location is consistent with it being the point source of
transmission. We show that SC2024's concerns about the use of centre-points are
inconsequential, and that use of centroids for these data is inadvisable. The
mode is an appropriate, even optimal, choice as centre; however, contrary to
SC2024's results, we demonstrate that with proper implementation of their
methods, the mode falls at the entrance of a parking lot at the market itself,
and the 95% confidence region around the mode includes the market. Thus, the
market cannot be rejected as central even by SC2024's overly stringent
statistical test. Our results directly contradict SC2024's and -- together with
myriad additional lines of evidence overlooked by SC2024, including crucial
epidemiological information -- point to the Huanan market as the early
epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic.
