I’m not at all suprised. Covid19 is a aerosolized virus that is infectious before it shows any symptoms. I bet it was all over the globe before hospitals in Wuhan started getting a lot of patients.
I imagine the main reason China detected the pandemic first was because they have systems like this set up after SARS https://www.businessinsider.com/medical-surveillance-allowed-china-to-discover-novel-coronavirus-2020-1
Same with Omicron. South Africa has a very good viral surveillance system, that is why they detected Omicron variant before anyone else. But they ended up with the stigma and travel bans anyway.
yup
The article title doesn’t back up the content. In particular, the article talks about how the blood samples it tested were taken
between December 13, 2019, and January 17, 2020.
Sooooooooo yea. It’s a stretch to say it was in the US in December 2019.
“These findings indicate that SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies were detected in 106 specimens, a small percentage of blood donations from California, Oregon, and Washington, as early as 13–16 December 2019.”
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472?login=false
Editing to add: studies are generally showing a similar trend in countries around the world: covid19 was around before people were aware it was, which really isn’t all that surprising. Spain and Italy, for instance, are both finding they likely had covid19 infections a month or more before the first reported case. An aerosolized virus, that often could be carried asymptomatically, could be mild in some cases, and could easily be mistaken for another flu, during an age of global travel… It’s pretty expected, really, that it spread a bit before being noticed
