Italian practitioners found something abnormal before the outbreak of coronavirus
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People might think it's flu, but it will not spread like flu - there would be too many cases to ignore. If it occurred in November, half the country would have it in a few weeks.
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The early phase of the COVID-19 outbreak in Lombardy, Italy
Cereda D, Tirani M, Rovida F, Demicheli V, Ajelli M, Poletti P, Trentini F, Guzzetta G, Marziano V, Barone A, Magoni M, Deandrea S, Diurno G, Lombardo M, Faccini M, Pan A, Bruno R, Pariani E, Grasselli G, Piatti A, Gramegna M, Baldanti F, Melegaro A, Merler S
(Submitted on 20 Mar 2020)
In the night of February 20, 2020, the first case of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was confirmed in the Lombardy Region, Italy. In the week that followed, Lombardy experienced a very rapid increase in the number of cases. We analyzed the first 5,830 laboratory-confirmed cases to provide the first epidemiological characterization of a COVID-19 outbreak in a Western Country. Epidemiological data were collected through standardized interviews of confirmed cases and their close contacts. We collected demographic backgrounds, dates of symptom onset, clinical features, respiratory tract specimen results, hospitalization, contact tracing. We provide estimates of the reproduction number and serial interval. The epidemic in Italy started much earlier than February 20, 2020. At the time of detection of the first COVID-19 case, the epidemic had already spread in most municipalities of Southern-Lombardy. The median age for of cases is 69 years (range, 1 month to 101 years). 47% of positive subjects were hospitalized. Among these, 18% required intensive care. The mean serial interval is estimated to be 6.6 days (95% CI, 0.7 to 19). We estimate the basic reproduction number at 3.1 (95% CI, 2.9 to 3.2). We estimated a decreasing trend in the net reproduction number starting around February 20, 2020. We did not observe significantly different viral loads in nasal swabs between symptomatic and asymptomatic. The transmission potential of COVID-19 is very high and the number of critical cases may become largely unsustainable for the healthcare system in a very short-time horizon. We observed a slight decrease of the reproduction number, possibly connected with an increased population awareness and early effect of interventions. Aggressive containment strategies are required to control COVID-19 spread and catastrophic outcomes for the healthcare system.
Subjects: Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
Cite as: arXiv:2003.09320 [q-bio.PE]
(or arXiv:2003.09320v1 [q-bio.PE] for this version)
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09320
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No updates for the vaccine for the rest of world.
For Indians the vaccine is already there..
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New signs suggest coronavirus was in California far earlier than anyone knew
By PAIGE ST. JOHNSTAFF WRITER
APRIL 11, 20205 AM
Source:https://www.latimes.com/california/...rus-deaths-signs-of-earlier-spread-california
SACRAMENTO — A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.
These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.
“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.
How long? A study out of Stanford suggests a dramatic viral surge in February.
But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was “a lot longer than we first believed” — most likely since “back in December.”
“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said in an interview. “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.”
Just as New York has strong ties to travelers from Europe, who are believed to have brought the coronavirus there from Italy, the Bay Area is a natural hub for those traveling to and from China. Santa Clara County had its first two cases of COVID-19 almost a week before federal approval of emergency testing for the disease Feb. 4. Both were in travelers returning from Wuhan, China, where the virus was rampant.
In January and most of February, there was little, if any, community testing in California.
The CDC provided testing materials to only some health departments, with restrictions that confined testing and thus the tracking of the novel coronavirus to those who were sick or exposed to someone already known to have COVID-19. The federal agency’s focus was on cruise ships, with Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess carrying the largest known cluster of COVID-19 cases outside of China. The first passenger tested positive for COVID-19 five days after the ship’s Jan. 20 departure from Japan. Eventually, 712 passengers and crew tested positive, and nine of them died.
COVID-19 did not reappear in the Bay Area until Feb. 27, when doctors finally decided to test a hospitalized woman who had been ill for weeks. She became the region’s first case of community-spread coronavirus.
But from there, almost every positive test pointed toward local spread. “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 still unsure how long the virus lurked are now turning to blood banks and other repositories to see if lingering antibodies can show them what was missed. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health is looking for virus antibodies in samples from blood banks in Los Angeles, San Francisco and four other cities across the country.
Santa Clara County’s first community-spread case also became its first announced COVID-19 death.
Azar Ahrabi, 68, died March 9, the second COVID-19 fatality in California, five days after the first. For the first few weeks, the urban county that sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, home to Stanford University and tech giants Apple and Google, led California in coronavirus deaths.
Health investigators said they could find no source of Ahrabi’s infection. Her family members said she stayed mostly at home, taking care of her mother. She seldom drove, and she walked to a local grocery store to shop. But she and her mother lived in a Santa Clara apartment complex in a neighborhood with a high density of international residents.
Relatives said she showed signs of illness in mid-February. For more than a week, they gave only a passing thought that her fever and sudden fatigue might be tied to the horrifying news out of China.
Ahrabi’s son, Amir, said that when his mother checked into a medical clinic Feb. 20 and was diagnosed with a nonspecific pneumonia, she was prescribed antibiotics and sent home. The next day, her doctor admitted her to the intensive care unit.
Amir said he asked that she be tested for COVID-19, and doctors told him the county health department would not approve the test. She met none of the qualifying criteria.
New studies out of Stanford University and the CDC, taken together, suggest that the novel coronavirus spread quickly through the Bay Area.
Stanford’s virology lab, looking retroactively at some 2,800 patient samples collected since January, did not find the first COVID-19 cases until late February — from two patients who were tested Feb. 21 and Feb. 23. Neither of those patients, the researchers note in a letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., would have met existing criteria for COVID-19 testing.
The California Department of Public Health and the CDC did not begin community surveillance for COVID-19 in Santa Clara County until March 5. Samples were collected from 226 coughing, feverish patients who visited four urgent care centers; 1 in 4 turned out to have the flu. The state tested samples from a subset of 79 non-flu patients. Nine of them had COVID-19.
The result suggested that 8% of people walking into the urgent care centers carried the novel coronavirus, an infection rate that mirrored the 5% infection rate at a Los Angeles medical center, the CDC said in a report published Friday.
LKJ86
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French doctors say they found a Covid-19 patient from December
By Maggie Fox, CNN
Updated 3:37 AM ET, Tue May 5, 2020
Source:https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/health/france-coronavirus-december-death-intl/index.html
(CNN) There's new evidence that the coronavirus may have been in France weeks earlier than was previously thought.
Doctors at a Paris hospital say they've found evidence that one patient admitted in December was infected with Covid-19. If verified, this finding would show that the virus was already circulating in Europe at that time -- well before the first known cases were diagnosed in France or hotspot Italy.
"Covid-19 was already spreading in France in late December 2019, a month before the official first cases in the country," the team at Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis wrote in a study published Sunday in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
The first official reports of Covid-19 in France were reported on Jan. 24, in two people who had a history of travel to Wuhan, China.
Intensive care specialist Dr. Yves Cohen and his hospital colleagues wrote that they decided to check the records of earlier patients, in case the virus had been spreading undetected.
Researchers in the US have also started finding evidence that the virus was infecting and killing people earlier than the country's first reported cases.
The French team looked at people admitted to the hospital with flu-like illness between December 2 and January 16 who were not ultimately diagnosed with influenza. They tested frozen samples from those patients for coronavirus.
"One sample was positive taken from a 42 year old man born in Algeria, who lived in France for many years, and worked as a fishmonger," the team wrote. "His last trip was in Algeria during August 2019."
The man had not been to China, and one of his children had also been sick, the team reported.
"Identifying the first infected patient is of great epidemiological interest as it changes dramatically our knowledge regarding SARS-COV-2 and its spreading in the country. Moreover, the absence of a link with China and the lack of recent travel suggest that the disease was already spreading among the French population at the end of December, 2019," they wrote.
Europe did not start reporting cases of coronavirus until January. In Italy, the European country hit hardest by the virus, the first two cases were reported on Jan 31, in two Chinese tourists in Rome. The first known community transmission was recorded at the end of February in Codogno, northern Italy.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect when the study was published online.
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Menthol
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So in France, they use patient lung scan results of the past and found the similarity as far as November 2019.
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SARS-CoV-2 detected in waste waters in Barcelona on March 12, 2019
26/06/2020
Recerca
Source:https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2020/06/042.html
COVID-19 was announced in Wuhan (China) in early December in 2019 and it would reach every place worldwide later, including Europe. The first case in Europe was announced in France in late January 2020. This chronology on the evolution of the disease can change according to a study led by the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with Aigües de Barcelona.
Researchers detected the presence of the virus that caused the disease in samples of waste water in Barcelona, collected in March 12, 2019. These results, sent to a high impact journal and published in the archive medRxiv, suggest the infection was present before knowing about any case of COVID-19 in any part of the world.
This study, which counts on the participation of the researchers of theGroup on Enteric Virus of the UB Gemma Chavarria Miró, Eduard Anfruns Estrada and Susana Guix, led by Rosa Maria Pintó and Albert Bosch, is part of the project on sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2. This initiative is coordinated by this research group, in collaboration with Aigües de Barcelona and funded by the REVEAL project, from the company SUEZ, in order to detect the virus in waste waters and adopt immediate measures considering future COVID-19 outbreaks.
An early detection tool
Altohugh COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, researchers proved there are large quantities of the coronavirus genome in the excrements that reach waste waters. This situation made the waste water-based epidemiology a potential tool for an early detection of the circulation of the virus among population, especially considering the important presence of asymptomatic people, especially considering the important presence of asymptomatic and asymptomatic people who transmit the virus.
As part of the sentinel surveillance project, and after April 13, the researchers analysed weekly the obtained samples in two big water treatment plants in Barcelona. “The levels of the SARS-CoV-2 genome coincided with the evolution of COVID-19 cases in the population”, notes Albert Bosch, professor at the Faculty of Biology of the UB and coordinator of the study.
COVID-19 cases hidden by the flu
Later, researchers analysed frozen samples from previous months to the systematic sampling, which revealed the growing apparition of SARS-CoV-2 genome between early January and early March in 2020, bringing the chronology of the coronavirus arrival in Spain even earlier: the presence of the virus was detected in January 15, 41 days before the announcement of the first case of COVID-19, which was announced on February 25.
According to the researchers, these results show the validity of the surveillance of waste waters to anticipate cases, specially considering the significant contribution of the asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers in the spreading of the virus. “Those infected with COVID-19 could have been diagnosed with flu in primary care by mistake, contributing to the community transmission before the public health took measures”, notes Albert Bosch, also president of the Spanish Society of Virology.
“In the specific case of Barcelona –the virologist continues–, having detected the SARS-CoV-2 spread a month before could have improved the response to the pandemic”.
Analysis of frozen samples from 2018 and 2019
These results encouraged the researchers to analyse some frozen samples between January 2018 and December 2019, with the shocking results of the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genome in March 2019, before any notification of COVID-19 cases in the world. “All samples were negatives regarding the SARS-CoV-2 genome presence except for March 12, 2019, in which the levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive, using two different targets”, says the researcher.
“Barcelona receives many visitors for both tourist and professional reasons, –continues Bosch–, and it is possible for a similar situation to have taken place in other parts of the world, and since most of the COVID-19 cases show a similar symptomatology to the flu, those cases could have been disguised as an undiagnosed flu”.
Models in the SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological surveillance
The Group on Enteric Viruses is also in charge of the scientific coordination of a project on the SARS-CoV-2 sentinel surveillance in waste waters in Spain, funded by the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge. This task counts on the participation of two groups from CSIC, the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC) and the Centre of Edafology and Applied Biology of Segura (CEBAS), as well as a group from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Moreover, together with the research group Microbiology of Water related to the Health (MARS) of the UB, led by Anicet Blanch, coordinates the surveillance of the same virus in Spanish waters.
Last, this group also takes part in a monitoring project on the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in waste waters in the entrance of Catalan treatment plants, funded by the Catalan Water Agency and coordinated by the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA). Another participant in this project is the Research Group on Virus, bacteria and protozoans of water interest in and food (VIRBAP) of the UB.
The French have said something similiar. Basically that the virus was in France before the military games in Wuhan.
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What you need to know about the coronavirus right now
Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:
www.reuters.com
What you need to know about the coronavirus right now
By Reuters Staff
(Reuters) - Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:
Virus emerged in Italy earlier than thought
The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy from September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute of the Italian city of Milan shows, signalling that COVID-19 might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought.
Italy’s first COVID-19 patient was detected on Feb. 21 in a little town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.
But the Italian researchers’ findings show that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed coronavirus antibodies well before February.
Asia at a crossroads as cases surge
Countries across the Asia-Pacific region reported record new coronavirus numbers and fresh outbreaks on Monday, with Japan facing mounting pressure to reimpose a state of emergency and South Korea warning it was at a “critical crossroads”.
The resurgence of the virus in Asia comes as travel restrictions are gradually being eased in the region.
New daily cases in Japan reached a record 1,722 on Saturday, with hot spots in the northern island of Hokkaido and the western prefectures of Hyogo and Osaka. In South Korea, officials reported more than 200 new cases for the third consecutive day on Monday.
Michigan, Washington state impose severe restrictions
Michigan and Washington state on Sunday imposed sweeping new restrictions on gatherings as total U.S. infections crossed the 11 million mark, just over a week after hitting 10 million.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered a ban on in-person high school and college classes as well as indoor dining service for three weeks as increasingly cold weather drives people indoors where the virus can spread more easily.
Washington state Governor Jay Inslee announced a one-month ban on indoor services at restaurants and gyms, and a reduction of in-store retail capacity to 25%.
J&J starts two-dose trial of its vaccine candidate
Johnson & Johnson launched a new large-scale late-stage trial on Monday to test a two-dose regimen of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine and evaluate potential incremental benefits for the duration of protection with a second dose.
The U.S. drugmaker plans to enrol up to 30,000 participants for the study and run it in parallel with a one-dose trial with as many as 60,000 volunteers that began in September.
The UK arm of the study is aiming to recruit 6,000 participants and the rest will join from other countries with a high incidence of cases such as the United States, Belgium, Colombia, France, Germany, the Philippines, South Africa and Spain.
UK PM to govern by Zoom
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was perfectly well after coming into contact with someone with COVID-19 and will drive the government forward via Zoom while he self-isolates for two weeks.
“I’m fit as a butcher’s dog - feel great,” Johnson said in a video tweet. “I’m bursting with antibodies.”
When Johnson caught COVID-19 in March, he tried to work through the illness “in denial” - but ended up wearing an oxygen mask in an intensive care unit and was ultimately out of action for almost a month.
Compiled by Linda Noakes, Editing by William Maclean
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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