Researchers believe they have found evidence that the novel coronavirus may have been circulating in the U.S. as early as late December, about a month before the current timeline from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.
This study, published last Thursday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, found a statistically significant uptick in clinic and hospital visits by patients who reported respiratory illnesses as early as the week of December 22.The researchers noticed this trend by looking through nearly 10 million medical records from the UCLA Health system, including three hospitals and 180 clinics.
Elmore and her colleagues noticed the spike in respiratory cases by searching the field in medical records that lists why someone came to the clinic and searched for the symptom "cough." They looked at the records for the month of December 2019 through February 2020 and compared their findings to records from the five prior years.
While scientists may never know for sure if these excess patients were early COVID-19 cases, Elmore doesn't think it's out of the question. "Based on what we know of a few other studies and now this one, I think definitely this could be something," Hoyen said. "It's certainly something that needs to be considered."
"We know from the SARS-CoV-2 genetic data that the pandemic started in late November/early December in China so there's absolutely no way the virus could have been spreading widely in December 2019. From the same genetic data we know that widespread transmission didn't start in the United States until February 2020," Andersen said in an email.
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