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Medicine United States

First US COVID Deaths Came Earlier Than Previously Thought (mercurynews.com) 128

Posted by BeauHD from the revised-timeline dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News, written by Harriet Blair Rowan: In a significant twist that could reshape our understanding of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, death records now indicate the first COVID-related deaths in California and across the country occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than originally thought and before officials knew the virus was circulating here. A half dozen death certificates from that month in six different states -- California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin -- have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus's deadly path quickly reached far beyond coastal regions that were the country's early known hotspots. Up until now, the Feb. 6, 2020, death of San Jose's Patricia Dowd had been considered the country's first coronavirus fatality, although where and how she was infected remains unknown.

Even less is known about what are now believed to be the country's earliest victims of the pandemic. The Bay Area News Group discovered evidence of them in provisional coronavirus death counts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) -- widely considered the definitive source for death data in the United States -- and confirmed the information through interviews with state and federal public health officials. But amid privacy concerns and fierce debate over pandemic policies, the names, precise locations and circumstances behind these deaths have not been publicly revealed. That is frustrating to some experts.

The existence of January 2020 deaths would dramatically revise the timeline of COVID's arrival in the United States. China first announced a mysterious viral pneumonia in late December 2019, and reported the first death from the illness on Jan. 9, 2020. The U.S. originally recorded its first case in mid-January when a traveler tested positive after returning from Wuhan, China. The first deaths reported in the United States, in late February, were also tied to travel. In its current death count, which reflects the six newly-discovered fatalities, the NCHS now lists the country's first COVID death during the week of Jan. 5-11 -- the first full week of 2020. The agency is in the final stages of preparing its 2020 annual mortality report, a review and analysis of all deaths in the United States last year.
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First US COVID Deaths Came Earlier Than Previously Thought More

First US COVID Deaths Came Earlier Than Previously Thought

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  • Who would've thought (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:11PM (#61723007)
    Who would've thought that information isn't like a game, and that clearer pictures will emerge a year, or even years later.

  • Doesn't suprise me, I think that I had it early (Score:4, Insightful)

    by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:23PM (#61723033) Journal

    I got sick with a nasty respiratory virus after visiting my local casino during Chinese New Year in early 2020. The flu test came back as negative, and they didn't have COVID tests at that point. Was it COVID? I'll probably never know, but it wouldn't shock me if it was.

    • I got sick with a nasty respiratory virus after visiting my local casino during Chinese New Year in early 2020. The flu test came back as negative, and they didn't have COVID tests at that point. Was it COVID? I'll probably never know, but it wouldn't shock me if it was.

      Worth getting an antibody test; even now there's a decent chance it will pick up whether you were infected. If you haven't had symptoms since you have a good guess and if you start getting health problems, especially breathing or heart, then at least you have a hint of what might be worth looking at.

      • If you're vaccinated, there is really no point in an antibody test, it will be positive.

        • If you're vaccinated, there is really no point in an antibody test, it will be positive.

          There are different antibodies - since the vaccine only has part of the virus (the spike protein), antibodies to other parts of the virus don't show up after the vaccination. At least one test available can tell the difference. I guess you have to ask about this first.

        • Not necessarily. [mit.edu]

          The FDA warns against trying to check for vaccine-induced immunity using currently available antibody tests. For one thing, many tests only detect antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, which are found only in people who have survived a natural infection. If you’ve never had COVID-19 and take one of those tests, you’ll get a negative result..

    • Re:Doesn't suprise me, I think that I had it early (Score:5, Interesting)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:45PM (#61723099)

      Was it COVID? I'll probably never know, but it wouldn't shock me if it was.

      Take an antigen test. Even if you are vaccinated you can see if you're reactive to the non-Spike proteins -- that will show whether you had covid sometime in the past (assuming you didn't get something like Measles which deletes pre-existing immunities). Then you'd know you had it in the past. You can also, if you really wanted to, do an epitope-specific antibody response test to see what specific epitopes you are reactive to. If you are reactive to an epitope of a variant that was in your area around February or March .. that means you likely did get it back then. Of course, you would need knowledge and access to a lab to do the epitope assays I am talking about.

    • Re:Doesn't suprise me, I think that I had it early (Score:5, Informative)

      by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:46PM (#61723101)
      There are a LOT of generic upper respiratory infections that all have similar flu-like symptoms. The "common cold" is caused by over 100 different viruses. This is a large part of what makes covid so utterly insidious. You almost certainly weren't the index case in your entire state, nor were you infected by the index case.

      If you haven't been infected since, and really want to find out, an antibody immune assay panel will determine if you have antibodies against the N protein. These are a completely unique marker to actual virus infection.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        Is there a way to do the antibody immune assay panel at home? I have access to a number of medical techs and nurses.

        • It has to be done in a lab, and it's not as simple as dropping sample A into test tube B either.

          https://www.biorxiv.org/conten... [biorxiv.org] has a picture of a COVAM array on page 19. There's ~200 microwells that cover 3 dozen cold, flu, sars, mers and covid antigen sites, and it all has to be measured using a fluorescence instrument.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

            I figured it wouldn't be too simple. Looks like I can't get the stuff to do it.
            I've had the vaccine. I wondered if I had the actual virus. I doubt it. However, if it was just $50 or something I'd like to find out.

    • I caught something around Halloween time 2019 that spread quickly through my office and laid me up for a day or two. Normally I wouldn't mention it but it severely affected my appetite by making me feel like something was going wrong with my stomach. For like 2 months my breakfasts were dry toast and my lunches were equally bland. The only real reason I could have a normal dinner is Marijuana is legal where I lived. It gave me enough relief to not just eat but ENJOY a regular dinner.

      I'm like 95% recov

    • I had some sort of pneumonia in early 2020, a couple weeks after my wife's boss came back from Hong Kong. Shortness of breath lasted months, and I had some longterm symptoms that eventually resulted in surgery, though I'm fine now. The specialists thought my condition odd, as I don't have the normal risk factors.

    • Was it COVID? I'll probably never know, but it wouldn't shock me if it was.

      Maybe. Maybe not. COVID isn't the only disease in the world with COVID like symptoms. If you didn't end up on a respirator there's a very good chance you got one of the many hundreds of viruses out there which seasonally cause very similar symptoms in people.

    • I hear "I think I had covid..." from tons of people who had some kind of cold/flu symptoms in the January-March time frame.

      I even used to think so myself, having flown to Key West at the end of February 2020 and then feeling weirdly sick for about 24 hours while I was there (dry throat, mild aches).

      My wife flew to Boston the first week in March and was mildly sick at some point after, and then I was sick with whatever she had about a week or two later. Another early Covid?

      I think the problem is that whatev

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BranMan ( 29917 )

      I have a pretty similar story - got sick after a casino visit around the 2nd-3rd week of Jan. Symptoms were straight out of the CoVid playbook - fever, cough, fatigue, the works. I've got allergies and get my fair share of colds/flu and nothing was ever like that. Before or since. As far as I know I had CoVid.

      Of course no good tests for it back then, and the doctor pooh-poohed the idea.

  • It came from a Kansas lab, I knew it! Those filthy pigtails; Toto licked them all day.

  • Meanwhile, in Missouri and Florida (Score:3, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:37PM (#61723069)

    At least one coroner is altering death certificates to not report cause of death as covid [thehill.com] if the family asks. Conveniently, the coroner uses the excuse that if the person had some underlying condition which could have caused the death, he'll change the certificate. Because had the person not contracted covid, they would have still died in a few days while hooked to a ventilator, right?

    As for Florida, we've known for some time Governor DeathSentence has been deliberately manipulating and undercounting [salon.com] the number of deaths from covid.

    • At least one coroner is altering death certificates to not report cause of death as covid [thehill.com] if the family asks. Conveniently, the coroner uses the excuse that if the person had some underlying condition which could have caused the death, he'll change the certificate. Because had the person not contracted covid, they would have still died in a few days while hooked to a ventilator, right?

      As for Florida, we've known for some time Governor DeathSentence has been deliberately manipulating and undercounting [salon.com] the number of deaths from covid.

      Get your Ivermectin shots - You can pick the real Covid Killer at your farm store. 90 percent cure and prophylactic effect. For Lungworms and intestinal parasites.

      Just the latest miracle med in what has become the throes of insanity by the kooks. Wassa matter - didn't the Hydroquinone, bleach injections or sticking a UV light up yer bum work? Florida appears to be on the way to Darwin award action - 5 police officers died from it just this week.

    • Pulling off that sort of data manipulation successfully requires undercounting both cases and deaths by the same percentage. Otherwise the fatality rate (deaths / cases) skews. This is pretty clearly going on in Mexico (fatality rate ~9% vs 2.1% for the world overall, 1.67% for the U.S.). And also China (fatality rate ~4.5%). They're probably deliberately underreporting their cases to try to make their national numbers look better. I suspect several EU countries are also underreporting cases, as they consis

    • Death certificates are just one piece of information, and are not as reliable as ICD-10 coding anyway. I realize this is slashdot so we are all experts at literally everything, but the death industry might be more complex than you realize.

  • Thank you for sharing. The covid pandemic is a global disaster

  • In January 2020 I took a trip to Miami and stayed in a hostel. I got a really bad flu at the tail end of that trip. Of course there was way more "normal flu" floating around than COVID-19 so statistically the chances are very low that I got COVID back then. But I did always wonder if it could have been missed, given how easy it would have been to both spread it in such an environment, and difficult to differentiate from a particularly nasty "regular" flu.

  • When it turns out the visitor testing +ve coming back from wuhan was the one who spread it there in the first place.

  • Two of my co-workers (were not co-workers at the time) got a very bad respiratory illness around November and December of 2019. Both said the doctors were unable to identify it. Both are certain they got Covid before it was publicly known.

  • Getting anyone to pay attention to a microcosm of facts in a pandemic is nigh on impossible. Becky A. died on January 19th, 2020, near Columbia, Missouri, of "influenza with respiratory complications". (Rest in peace, Becky. We miss you.) We're pretty sure a plane coming in to Kansas City from Washington state had some of the first cases on it from over seas after doing the reconstruction amongst a large group of acquaintances. I caught my first bout of Covid19 on February 11th, 2020, and had an 11-mont

  • I am pretty sure my wife and I had Covid early December. I was way sicker than normal for any flu for a week or two. I never did get a test to find out for sure.

    I have a friend who also was very sick around early December, might have even been late November - after Covid started spreading later on in 2020 they took a test that showed they had it.

    Pretty sure it got out sometime in October and slowly spread from there...

  • There's evidence Covid-19 existed in the wild, far beyond Wuhan, and months earlier.

    https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... [medrxiv.org]

  • because it comes from China, was covered up by China,and lied about by China.

    Also because it sounds funny - particularly when Trump says it.

  • You probably didn't. I have a similar experience. I had something quite serious for two weeks in early march 2020, caught it probably by my father, who had it a week earlier. Although he claims that it was definitely covid and that the symptoms were exactly the same, I don't think so and after unbiased look at the evidence, it is extremely unlikely. I mean, there were no confirmed cass in our surroundings, there were like three confirmed cases in the entire country, no deaths either. Memory is sometimes qui

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Shaeun ( 1867894 )

      You probably didn't. I have a similar experience. I had something quite serious for two weeks in early march 2020, caught it probably by my father, who had it a week earlier. Although he claims that it was definitely covid and that the symptoms were exactly the same, I don't think so and after unbiased look at the evidence, it is extremely unlikely. I mean, there were no confirmed cases in our surroundings, there were like three confirmed cases in the entire country, no deaths either. Memory is sometimes quite unreliable.

      If there is no way to test for it, and 90% of people only get a mild case then how can you know there was none around you? The flu in 2019 had the "wrong vaccine" created. It makes one wonder if early on the flu and COVID were conflated because nobody knew any better. Most people only see what they know to look for. It is far more likely that you did have it and did not know than you did not have it. Especially given that this is an incredibly contagious bug where you show no symptoms while you are the mo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shess ( 31691 )

        You probably didn't. I have a similar experience. I had something quite serious for two weeks in early march 2020, caught it probably by my father, who had it a week earlier. Although he claims that it was definitely covid and that the symptoms were exactly the same, I don't think so and after unbiased look at the evidence, it is extremely unlikely. I mean, there were no confirmed cases in our surroundings, there were like three confirmed cases in the entire country, no deaths either. Memory is sometimes quite unreliable.

        If there is no way to test for it, and 90% of people only get a mild case then how can you know there was none around you? The flu in 2019 had the "wrong vaccine" created. It makes one wonder if early on the flu and COVID were conflated because nobody knew any better. Most people only see what they know to look for. It is far more likely that you did have it and did not know than you did not have it. Especially given that this is an incredibly contagious bug where you show no symptoms while you are the most contagious.

        In other words, given that immunity from natural infections has been known to wane, how is there any way to know?
        This is just a continuation of "YOU DO NOT HAVE COVID" from March 2019. It was a stupid argument then, it is a stupid argument now. Especially given that immunity from the vaccines wanes so testing is unreliable and there is evidence it was "in the wild" well before anyone noticed it.

        TLDR - Give it a rest, you can't possibly know. .

        Basically, if all of the people with ambiguous respiratory infections in Q1 of 2020 had COVID-19, we'd have reached herd immunity in Q2 of 2020, and we wouldn't currently be having over-committed ICU wards in Q3 of 2021.

        I mean, you're right, there are so many unknowns that you can't say with any certainty a given individual DIDN'T have COVID-19. You don't know, it could happen! But given the testing results not long after, it's reasonable to say that maybe 1 in 100 of the individuals who think "Maybe it w

      • You are right, I can't possibly know. This is just an opinion based on the (severely lacking) data and ex-post looking at alternatives, taking into aqccount human feeling of exclusivity.

        It is far more likely that you did have it and did not know than you did not have it

        I think the exact opposite, but as you say, we can't possibly know.

  • The earliest cases go back even further.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]

  • Pandemic false starts (Score:3)

    by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @07:56AM (#61724413)

    I wonder if there's any modeling or epidemiological data to indicate how many "false starts" pandemics have before they break out and become actual pandemics.

    It's doesn't seem unreasonable that Covid could have infected a few people and then burned out for various highly localized reasons -- ie, an early infected person who happens to live alone or has few social contacts recovering before they can spread it, that kind of thing. And maybe not even 1-2 people, but more than that, but for various weird social/medical reasons it doesn't expand past its initial pool.

    Such a "false start" could possibly mean a series of minor outbreaks well before the virus got significantly established in the population and became a pandemic.

  • Analysis of blood that was collected late 2019 and early 2020 has proved conclusively that COVID was already widespread in the US by then [nih.gov]. China and WHO were still claiming it wasn't transmittable between humans.

    It wasn't until it became political that people started dying of it.

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