Story at a glance
- Several people in the U.S. were infected with COVID-19 in late December 2019 and early January 2020, weeks before the first cases were confirmed.
- Blood samples taken for a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health revealed the virus infected seven people in five states, including Illinois, Mississippi and Wisconsin.
- Despite the relatively low number, experts say the data offers a view into states that were not initially on health officials’ “radar.”
Several people in the U.S. were infected with COVID-19 in late December 2019 and early January 2020, weeks before the first cases were confirmed.
Blood samples taken for a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed the virus infected seven people in five states, including Illinois, Mississippi and Wisconsin. Researchers, whose findings were published by the online journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found evidence of nine infections out of samples from 24,079 participants.
The samples were taken between Jan. 2 and March 18, 2020, with antibodies in two samples traced to Illinois residents taken Jan. 7 and 8.
Three samples were in Illinois, one was from Massachusetts and one each from Wisconsin, Mississippi and Pennsylvania prior to the first confirmed cases.
Despite the relatively low number, experts say the data offers a view into states that were not initially on health officials’ “radar.”
“It helps us understand a little bit more about the geographic spread of where the virus was in those very early days of the U.S. epidemic,” Keri Althoff, lead author and associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
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“Oftentimes, especially with something like a respiratory viral infection, the first case we see is not the very first case in whatever geographic region,” Althoff continued, adding that the study does not serve as evidence to theories that COVID-19 originated in the U.S. The dominant theory remains that the first COVID-19 cases were recorded in China’s Wuhan province.
“If you were to look at just the air-traffic-control patterns across the world in December of 2019 and January 2020, people were still moving about a lot during this time,” she said, according to WSJ. “The world was a very global place.”
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Published on Jun 15,2021