New data suggests coronavirus may have established itself in California months before health officials first began looking for it.
While health officials attributed the first COVID-19 cases in California to people who had traveled to China, two people who fell sick in February and later died appear to have contracted the virus from community spread, reported the LA Times.
“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” said Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician and chief executive of Santa Clara County government.
While a Stanford study asserts there was a viral surge in February, Smith says new CDC data points to the virus being around “a lot longer than we first believed” going as far as “back in December.”
“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith added. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”
“When public health [officials] tried to track down the start of the disease … we weren’t able to find, specifically, a contact,” Smith told county supervisors. “That means the virus is in the community already — not, as was suspected by the CDC, as only in China and being spread from contact with China.”
Researchers are now trying to analyze specimens from blood banks and other repositories to see if antibodies can pinpoint when precisely the virus first started circulating within the population.
As of Friday, there have been more than 21,000 positive cases of coronavirus in California, with at least 594 deaths.