OCTOBER 2018 393 CARS
taken in late 2019. They have so far been able to identify two scans ‘consistent’ with the symptoms of Covid-19 dating back to midNovember. The images show white shadows on the lungs of patients of a type ‘typical of’ coronavirus.
‘The first case was noted in our centre on November 16,’ Schmitt said in a press release. The other was taken two days later.
Using the same method, the Schmitt team has also identified 12 probable coronavirus cases in December and 16 in January.
The team’s findings were announced in May, shortly after another French doctor, Dr Yves Cohen, head of emergency medicine at two hospitals near Paris, revealed he had found a positive test for coronavirus there from December 27.
Dr Cohen’s team retested blood samples from 24 patients suspected to have flu. His findings seem to confirm that the virus was in France weeks before it was officially reported there on January 24.
Other European countries are now understood to be examining similar evidence, amid suspicion that the outbreak in Italy, in particular, started far earlier than was originally thought.
BRITISH EXPAT FELL ILL IN NOVEMBER
CONNOR Reed, a 25-year-old from Llandudno in North Wales, was the first British person confirmed to have caught the coronavirus.
The expat teacher, who worked at a school in Wuhan, recalled falling ill on November 25 when he ‘woke up feeling really bad. I was coughing a lot and lost my voice’.
Initially, he put his symptoms down to a bog-standard cold. But over the ensuing days he developed what seemed like severe flu and was forced to stop working by early December. His illness progressed into pneumonia, along with other classic Covid-19 symptoms.
After he had recovered later that month, Reed says his doctors confirmed that he was suffering from coronavirus. In theory, that means he fell ill long before China’s authorities accept that the outbreak started. But it is possible that he caught a cold two weeks before contracting the virus.
Another British person who may have been infected in Wuhan at around the same time was Andy Gill, lead guitarist of the band Gang Of Four, who died in February after visiting the city during a November tour of Asia.
His widow, author Catherine Mayer, has claimed in a blog entry that Gill was admitted to hospital in the UK in January after developing a ‘respiratory illness’, with the cause of death officially listed as pneumonia and organ failure.
Writing on her website, Mayer revealed that Gill had suffered several of the symptoms of Covid19, including low oxygen, lethargy and diminished appetite. One of Gill’s doctors said there was ‘a real possibility that Andy had been infected by SARS-CoV-2’.
Although tests came back negative, this was not, the specialist explained, a definitive answer. ‘By the time of Andy’s admission to hospital, he had been ill for weeks,’ she wrote. ‘The virus could have already left his body but triggered immune complications.’
DECEMBER — U.S. VICTIM IN HOSPITAL
THE first U.S. case of Covid-19 was announced on January 21 in Snohomish County, just north of Seattle, when a man who had recently travelled to Wuhan fell ill.
However, it recently emerged that two other locals, who became ill in December, have also tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies, suggesting that the disease may have arrived in America a month earlier than previously though.
One victim, a woman identified only by her middle name, Jean, told the Seattle Times she became unwell just after Christmas with a dry cough, fever and body aches. She made two trips to the doctor and was sufficiently unwell to be given chest X-rays and a prescription for an inhaled medication.
At the time, Covid-19 had not been formally discovered or named, so she was not tested. Her more recent positive antibody test result is not definitive proof she had Covid-19 in December because it doesn’t show when she was infected. But officials say a second local who reported similar symptoms at the time has also tested positive.
‘The amount of air travel into and out of Wuhan was enormous, probably thousands and thousands of people,’ Dr Art Reingold, a public health epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters. ‘It follows that there [were] likely multiple introductions around the world, quite possibly in December.’
UK SKIER ‘INFECTED ON NEW YEAR TRIP’
THE availability of antibody tests is now providing growing evidence that Covid-19 entered the UK shortly after Christmas. This week, a London art director who fell ill on January 6 after returning from a skiing holiday in Austria was given a positive result. Susannah Ford, 53, said she is convinced she caught it at the Obergurgl resort, which is less than eight miles from the Italian border and 65 miles from Ischgl, which is facing a criminal probe over allegations that it covered up an outbreak for weeks.
‘I felt like death,’ she told The Sunday Times. ‘I ached terribly in every muscle and joint for five days and was too groggy even to go to the Eliot Prize for poetry.’
Her test result, of course, does not indicate when she caught the disease, so she could have contracted it later (despite not having suffered any symptoms).
Much of this apparent supporting evidence is anecdotal. Many British people think they suffered from Covid-19 around Christmas, at the time believing it to be just a very bad flu. But apart from Susannah Ford, few of them have so far tested positive for antibodies.
Professor Sebastian Johnston, an expert in respiratory medicine at Imperial College London, whose company Virtus Respiratory Research has developed a highly sensitive quantitative Covid-19 antibody test, told the Mail he has so far used it on about a dozen people who ‘had symptoms consistent with Covid from January and back through to December, and had got the idea that they may have had the virus’. Not one has come back positive. Prof. Johnston does not believe the coronavirus was in the UK much earlier than official data shows. He says: ‘The first death is a sign that it has reached pretty widespread community transmission, and in the UK ours was not until March 5.’
The date of the first confirmed case across the water in the UK remains January 31, and transmission was not recorded there until the end of February.