Coronavirus had been infecting people in the US even before China reported its first cases on December 31, 2019, research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Red Cross has revealed.
American medics officially registered their first Covid-19 patient on January 19, 2020, but the findings in a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggest the virus may have been circulating in the US prior to that.
The researchers studied almost 7,400 blood donations made in nine US states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. Evidence of Covid-19 bodies antibodies, the presence of which suggest a person had contact with the virus, were present in 106 of those samples, according to the study.
This means coronavirus could have been in the US a month before it saw its first confirmed case, and weeks before the Chinese authorities announced the infection in the city of Wuhan.
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