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The coronavirus was likely in the US before anyone knew it existed.
It's now hard to believe we ever assumed otherwise.
mmcfalljohnsen@businessinsider.com (Morgan McFall-Johnsen,David Slotnick)
Business Insider June 7, 2020, 6:52 AM CDT


coronavirus planes parked airport alabama birmingham
coronavirus planes parked airport alabama birmingham
Delta Air Lines passenger planes are seen parked due to flight reductions made to slow the spread of coronavirus, at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport in Birmingham, Alabama, March 25, 2020.

Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

The coronavirus may have reached the US by late December, mounting evidence suggests.

Nearly 1 million passengers flew from mainland China to the US from November 17 to February 1.

Because the US did not initially test widely for COVID-19, epidemiologists don't know how far the virus spread in early 2020. Outbreaks in major cities quickly got out of hand.

That head start allowed the virus to take root long before the CDC could detect it.

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On January 19, a 35-year-old man walked into an urgent care center in Snohomish County, Washington, with a cough and a fever. Four days earlier, he had returned from a trip to Wuhan, China.

A test revealed his diagnosis the next day: The US had its first case of COVID-19.

But he was almost certainly not the true first. Since then, a growing number of puzzle pieces have revealed a different picture of the beginning of the country's outbreak — one that in retrospect seems so obvious it's hard to imagine we ever believed otherwise. The coronavirus probably began spreading in the US in December, before we even knew it existed.

The Washington state patient was just one of nearly 1 million passengers who flew from mainland China to the US between November 17, 2019 — China's earliest estimate for the new coronavirus' emergence — and February 1, 2020. According to data provided to Business Insider by Cirium, a database and analytics company that tracks commercial air traffic, 3,357 flights occurred during that time. That's a total of 994,281 seats.

Though some of those seats were probably empty, any of the travelers could have carried the virus.

"I think that's highly plausible," Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Business Insider. "Well back into December, there was a period of time where there was a lot of international travel in and out of Wuhan."

Indeed, two people who fell ill in Washington state in December later tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, The Seattle Times reported. (Though it's possible they had a more common illness at the time, then got an asymptomatic case of coronavirus later.)

"If it turns out that the virus was already in several cities in the United States by December, that is fairly consistent with everything we now understand about how this virus spreads," Meyers added.



fauci coronavirus outbreak beginning january white house briefing
fauci coronavirus outbreak beginning january white house briefing
Anthony Fauci, director of National Institutes of Health Infectious Disease, speaks to reporters about the coronavirus at the White House in Washington, DC, January 31, 2020.

Leah Millis/Reuters

That flight data, of course, doesn't account for people coming from Europe, though genetic studies suggest that's how the pathogen got to the US East Coast. In France, a man arrived at a hospital outside Paris coughing up blood on December 27, four days before the WHO learned of China's mysterious outbreak. His sample later tested positive for COVID-19.

Given the highly globalized nature of our world, any possibility that this was just a "Chinese virus," as President Donald Trump has called it, now seems a foolish thought. That misconception allowed for early, undetected spread and contributed to a slow federal response that made the American outbreak into the disastrous, uncontrollable beast it has become.

Let's review the timeline


Airport cleaning Wuhan
Airport cleaning Wuhan
A firefighter conducts disinfection at the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, China, April 3, 2020.

Xinhua/Cheng Min via Getty Images

You probably remember how this all began: In late December, dozens of severe and inexplicable pneumonia cases began cropping up in Wuhan, the sprawling capital of China's Hubei province. The patients had fevers, labored breathing, and lesions on their lungs.

China reported the new affliction to the World Health Organization on January 3, after the organization requested information about rumors it had seen on an open-source platform, the Associated Press reported.

By then, the virus had likely been infecting humans for at least a month. Government data traces the country's first COVID-19 case to November 17, according to the South China Morning Post.

"As soon as it became clear that there was a large outbreak in Wuhan, we were — and we should have been — aware that there was a reasonable chance that the virus had already arrived through international travel, or would soon arrive through international travel in the United States and all over the world," Meyers said.



coronvairus miami florida airport
coronvairus miami florida airport
A passenger wearing a mask waits to check in for a flight at Miami International Airport in Florida, March 21, 2020.

Carlos Barria/Reuters

Indeed, the timeline of the US's outbreak has required revisions.

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn't confirm community spread in California until February 27, a recent CDC report found that the virus actually began to spread in the country between January 18 and February 9. The US's first coronavirus death, California autopsies have shown, happened weeks earlier than we originally thought. In Florida, at least 170 people who were later confirmed to have COVID-19 first reported their symptoms from December 31 to February 29, according to the Miami Herald.

On January 30, however, CDC director Robert Redfield told reporters that "the immediate risk to the American public is low."

The early size of the US outbreak may never be clear
I have not spoken about this here before . Two weeks before Christmas 2019, I came down with a very persistent cough.
.It stayed with me about three and half weeks. I even remarked to my wife- Ive never had a cough like this before.
But since it never knocked me down weak, I never sought medical help-- instead I just decided to- tough it out.
Second week I went about 4/5 days sleeping 5 to 6 hours every day , usually from about 10/11 am to late afternoon.
That was in addition to my night sleeping. about mid January I was definitely getting over it. Entire thing from start to a time the cough went completely away was about 7/8 weeks.
Thing is I kept telling my wife- this is so unlike anything Ive ever had before. I decided it was just some new kind of flu that my body fought of fairly well. Thing is after my reading, studying this virus I am convinced that I had it.
Thing is - I take two blood pressure medications and now medical science are stating those blood pressure meds alleviate the symptoms of the virus.
I truly think that I had it and was just one of the lucky ones it did not severely hit.--Tyr