A new study has found that the coronavirus may have been in the United States in December. Doesn’t mean you’ll never know if you had it then

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Researchers looked at blood donations made in December and early January and found evidence of antibodies to the new coronavirus in at least 84 samples from nine states – which would suggest these people had been infected with coronavirus.

“These results suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States before January 19, 2020,” researchers from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Red Cross wrote in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Many people wonder if they may have had a coronavirus at the start of the pandemic, or even before people knew the virus was circulating.

It would be hard to know unless someone took a coronavirus test at the time – something that clearly didn’t exist. Symptoms are similar to many other influenza infections: cough, fever, body aches, possibly a sore throat.

And without a sample taken at the time of infection or shortly thereafter, it will be impossible to know if an individual was infected at the time, said Dr Ian Lipkin, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University. .

Antibody tests can indicate a past infection, but not when it happened.

CDC was 'never blind' to early spread of coronavirus in United States, director says

“You can’t distinguish between someone infected in December or infected in March or April,” Lipkin told CNN.

A person’s immune response to a viral infection such as Covid-19 changes over time. Several studies have shown that antibody responses increase immediately after infection and then change over time. It is not yet known how long the human body maintains an immune response to a coronavirus infection.

“There are tests that in the first few weeks of infection indicate a very recent infection, but after that you can’t really tell,” Lipkin said. The only exception would be if someone had taken a blood test earlier that showed they were negative for the virus.

But the study shows that donated blood can be an important source of information about when the virus began to circulate, researchers from the CDC and Red Cross said. “These results also underscore the value of donated blood as a source of SARS-CoV-2 surveillance,” they wrote in Tuesday’s report. SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific name for the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19.

Blood donations in storage since last year could be tested for antibodies, although the type of test could be important. Several other coronaviruses cause colds and tests could mistakenly detect infections with these viruses, the CDC and Red Cross researchers noted.

“We clearly want to know how long this virus has been around,” Lipkin added.

“People are trying to find out when this first appeared outside of China.”

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