originally recorded its first case in mid-January when a traveler tested positive after returning from Wuhan, China. China first announced a mysterious viral pneumonia in late December 2019, and reported the first death from the illness on Jan. The existence of January 2020 deaths would dramatically revise the timeline of COVID’s arrival in the United States. It took more than two months for tests to reveal the otherwise healthy 57-year-old San Jose woman had been infected with the COVID-19 virus when she died. It’s likely, said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, that these early cases were initially written off as colds or flus.ĭowd’s mysterious death wasn’t originally attributed to COVID. Coronavirus testing was not common in early 2020, but if health workers took blood at the time, a medical examiner could later test the sample for the virus or antibodies, or do a PCR test for the virus on a tissue sample if an autopsy was performed. During the pandemic, a coroner who originally attributed an early 2020 death broadly to a respiratory virus might later learn the person had traveled to China, where the virus is believed to have originated, or had contact with someone who had, and reach the conclusion that they had COVID. When someone dies for unknown reasons, death certificates can be updated months and even years after a person has died to reflect new information. Anderson, whose team collects death data from every state, said his agency isn’t provided that level of detail. “Certifiers are reluctant to amend death certificates unless there’s a good reason to do so,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the NCHS.īut what led a coroner or doctor to make such a significant and possibly historic change in these cases is unclear. The National Center for Health Statistics describes its provisional death counts for COVID as “the most complete and accurate picture of lives lost to COVID-19.” At the time, most of those were explained away as incorrect dates and other data glitches.īut this past week, the federal agency told this news organization that it had worked with state officials to contact the certifiers in five cases - while waiting to hear back from a sixth - and confirmed that death certificates from January 2020 have now been intentionally revised to include COVID. The Bay Area News Group first reported in April that the CDC was investigating why multiple COVID-related fatalities before Dowd’s death began appearing earlier this year in state and federal records. In January, when the United States announced it would begin limiting travel from China and other international hotspots, the virus may already have been speeding across state borders. “There’s a lot to think about here.”įor instance, the far-flung nature of the deaths - in the West, Midwest and South - might suggest that restrictions on travel and social interactions should have been used in more places much earlier - and that such rapid response could be a more critical tool in the next pandemic. “We need to sit back and really assess what was this thing, when it started, how did we handle it, did we create more of a problem than we needed to, could we have handled things differently?” said Matthew Memoli, director of the clinical studies unit at the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. But amid privacy concerns and fierce debate over pandemic policies, the names, precise locations and circumstances behind these deaths have not been publicly revealed. The Bay Area News Group discovered evidence of them in provisional coronavirus death counts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) - widely considered the definitive source for death data in the United States - and confirmed the information through interviews with state and federal public health officials. 6, 2020, death of San Jose’s Patricia Dowd had been considered the country’s first coronavirus fatality, although where and how she was infected remains unknown.Įven less is known about what are now believed to be the country’s earliest victims of the pandemic. In a significant twist that could reshape our understanding of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, death records now indicate the first COVID-related deaths in California and across the country occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than originally thought and before officials knew the virus was circulating here.Ī half dozen death certificates from that month in six different states - California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin - have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus’s deadly path quickly reached far beyond coastal regions that were the country’s early known hotspots.
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