The beginning of the covid-19 pandemic in the US may have been earlier and much larger than official records indicate, according to a new study. Researchers found that a substantial proportion of people, including children, in Seattle who were suspected of having the flu this past winter probably had covid-19 instead. The estimate also the city may have had thousands of cases had in early March, when barely more than a hundred cases were reported in the state.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin looked back at two different periods in the early days of the pandemic: the month of January in Wuhan, China, and the weeks of late February and beginning of March in Seattle, Washington. They studied data from hospitals and doctors’ offices that collected samples from outpatient patients diagnosed with flu-like symptoms; these samples were later reanalyzed for the presence of the coronavirus causing covid-19.
In both cities it was found that most of these cases were influenza, but more than a third were actually covid-19 in Wuhan, while more than one in every 10 cases were covid-19 in Seattle, the team concluded. Based on the known trajectory of the flu season in both areas, the researchers then made a model of how early and widespread covid-19 had probably been in those early weeks.
By its estimates, Seattle had at least 9,000 cases by March 9, when the city implemented lockdown measures such as closing schools and there were less than 200 cases. report in the state as a whole; of these, thousands probably involved children. Wuhan was right on January 22 over 12,000 cases, just when the Chinese government issued them lockdown and had only a little over 400 official cases. They also rumored that people spread the virus in Seattle through the first week of January and possibly even as early as Christmas, while the first Wuhan case sometimes occurred between late October and early December.
The findings of the study were published in the journal EClinicalMedicine.
G / O Media can get a commission
Other studies have been right placed the beginning of the pandemic further back in time than official records have shown (the first case discovered in the U.S., in Washington, was January 15). But this study not only dates the origin of the outbreak in the US further back to January 15—it also suggests that this spread in the first hotspots was much more extensive than we knew. And the researchers’ method of comparing flu to covid-19 cases this past winter could also be used to estimate how much covid-19 cases were wrongly caused by flu in other areas in the US that were hit early by the pandemic, such as New York City and California.
“We can go back and share the history of this pandemic with a combination of research techniques and modeling,” said lead author Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology and statistics and data science at UT Austin, in a statement issued by the university. “This helps us understand how the pandemic is spreading so rapidly around the world and provides insight into what we can see in the coming weeks and months.”
The study has its limitations. The model estimates are based on a number of assumptions, such as how many people can carry the virus without becoming ill (asymptomatic patients). If 50 percent of all cases are asymptomatic, as some research has found, then the team numbers would actually experience the extent of the covid-19s spread in Seattle and Wuhan.
But along with other research, this study is only the latest to show how truly unprepared the US really was for the pandemic – a problem that persists more than six months later.
.
