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“It’s a very emotional thing for some families whether they like it on the death certificate or not,” Dr Gill said. “It shouldn’t be. It is a matter of public health.
In the spring of 2020, Dr Gill said, he became concerned that Connecticut was overlooking deaths from Covid-19, especially among nursing home residents whose complicated medical histories can sometimes obscure the causes of death. . In a few hundred cases, he said, the medical examiner’s office has taken deep nasal swabs from bodies at funeral homes. The team found a number of cases.
With China refusing to share more information on its own early cases, the World Health Organization recently said it was helping researchers dig into case reports in late 2019 outside of China. In Italy, researchers have reported anti-coronavirus antibodies in blood samples from September 2019, as well as signs of the virus in a skin sample from a patient from November of the same year. Some scientists, however, questioned both results.
“The further back you can go, the more informative it can be – if you have real confirmed cases,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist whose lab re-tested Italian blood samples and couldn’t confirm the first ones. case. She added, “To declare a much earlier introduction of the pandemic virus to an area, you need to have a high level of certainty. “
An analysis of U.S. blood tests released this summer suggested the virus may have been circulating in Illinois as early as December 24, 2019, although scientists have said these methods are also fallible.
Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of this study, said small clusters of cases could have developed without triggering a full-blown epidemic. “It is not fully known where Covid was seeded in the United States,” she said, “but it was probably not a single seed.”
Alyssa Lukpat contributed reporting and Susan Beachy contributed research.
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