The First Case of Coronavirus Pandemic was reported in the United States on January 21, 2020 and the first death from Coronavirus was reported on February 29, 2020, according to official U.S. data. However, some studies have shown that some public health events in the United States have been suspicious since the second half of 2019. The study suggests that the new coronavirus appeared in the United States, or sooner than the first confirmed case of Coronavirus was officially reported in the United States.
In May, researchers screened remaining respiratory samples from respiratory pathogen tests submitted by patients with symptoms between November 2019 and early March 2020 and found that new coronaviruses were detected in seven samples from six patients dating back to mid-January 2020, according to an article in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases by the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among them, the earliest positive patients had no history of travel, but their families suffered from similar symptoms. The study provides strong evidence that the new coronavirus spread to communities in the Los Angeles area well before extensive diagnostic testing in early 2020, the paper said.
On June 8th, Nature Communications published an article by the research team at mount Sinai Icahn Medical School in the United States. Using a sample collection strategy, the researchers detected previously undetected covid-19 viruses in nasopharyngeal samples from 3,040 patients with respiratory pathogens negative in Mount Sinai Health System in New York. These patients have been assessed for respiratory symptoms or flu-like illnesses in the first 10 weeks of 2020. The researchers detected the new coronavirus RNA from specimens collected as early as January 25, 2020, and identified complete new coronavirus genome sequences from multiple sample pools collected in late February and early March. The study said the results provided evidence of sporadic neo-coronavirus infection, a full month before the first officially recorded case in New York City in March 2020.
A new antibody test study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, the University of California, Harvard Medical School, and others examined samples originally collected through the National Institutes of Health’s National Research Program and found that new coronavirus infections in five U.S. states will appear by December 2019, the National Institutes of Health reported on Its website on June 15. At the beginning of the U.S. outbreak from January to March 2020, testing throughout February 2020 focused on patients with travel histories, masking the emergence of the virus and community transmission, the study said.
The researchers analyzed 24,079 stored blood samples from all participants in the 50-state Universal Study Program between January 2 and March 18, 2020, and detected new coronavirus antibodies in nine samples, seven of which were positive cases from Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, ahead of the first confirmed cases reported in those five states. The findings suggest that the new coronavirus infection occurred just weeks before the first confirmed case in five U.S. states. The paper notes that the samples that tested positive were taken as early as January 7, 2020 in Illinois. The 14-day time between infection with the coronavirus and the emergence of antibodies suggests that the coronavirus could have appeared in Illinois as early as December 24, 2019.
The findings extend a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases on November 30 last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For the study, researchers tested blood donation samples collected in nine U.S. states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020 to see if there were antibodies against the new coronavirus. Researchers found antibodies to the new coronavirus in blood samples, suggesting that the virus appeared in the United States earlier than December 13, 2019. The paper says the data suggest that outbreaks in the U.S. occurred much earlier, so researchers found antibodies to the new coronavirus in blood samples taken on December 13, 2019, “which may also explain why there are so many new cases of Coronavirus in the United States.”
