It's Wednesday, June. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. A new study done by the National Institutes of Health is showing that in five states some people were infected with COVID nineteen before those states recorded their first cases. Blood samples collected between January and March of were tested for anybody's Out of thousand samples, nine came back positive. Betsy McKay, senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for more.
Thanks for joining us today, Betsy, thanks for having We have a new research study that was done by the National Institutes of Health that turned up evidence of a possible coronavirus infection in the United States, multiple ones, actually as early as December, maybe sometime around Christmas time. And so these are all weeks before the first documented infections in the country and and and even in those particular states as well. Uh So, Betsy, walk us through some
of this. What do we what are we learning? So, the n i H has a big research program that you and the listeners may have heard of, called the All of Us Research Program, and its goal is to enroll a million people across the country of diverse backgrounds, and through the database that they built on that to study risk factors for disease and treatments and so forth. They're building this big database of blood samples and so
forth from people volunteers who enroll. So what they decided to do is use the blood samples that they have collected so far to look at this kind of growing question of interest. You know, how early did the pandemic reach US shores? When when did people first start getting sick? Because we know the first person to be you know, formally diagnosed was in late January, around January nineteen, but
that was right after a test became available. So the CDC Center Starch the Zoo Control Prevention developed the test, it's made available in its lab and boom, two days later, someone has this. So that raises a question as well, are they really the first person or not. So these researchers went through and tested blood samples going back to the beginning of January. As you mentioned, this program had nothing to do with COVID. We didn't really know about it then, So this is just a program that had
been ongoing. I think out of two thousand, a little over twenty four thousand participants, they found evidence of infection in just nine people. That suggests a number of different things.
What they did find though, also is that in five states Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they had people that have showed evidence of infection and that was all before you know, anybody had gotten in those first states, big areas like California and New York, there was no infections that turned up at least in the in these
blood samples. What they found was that people, you know, they looked at blood samples going back into early January, and what they were looking for with antibodies in the blood. These are blood samples that were taken at the time and then they're frozen and stored for research later. So the researchers go back, they test the bloods for antibodies using two different tests to make sure that it really is the COVID nineteen virus called stars Kobe two and
not something else. So they found, you know, one person on January seven, one person on January eight, and that the antibodies they found normally start to appear about two weeks after someone is infected, so that means those two people one in Illinois and one in Massachusetts were likely infected round December December twenty four or maybe a little bit earlier. Then they went later in time through March, and you know, twenty four thousand samples, as you said,
you only found nine cases. So what that shows is that certainly the virus was here earlier than we knew before, and a couple of studies have shown that now, but it wasn't, you know, not in large numbers. I mean, these were kind of like sporadic cases, and that happens often with infectious to these is you know, something that causes an outbreak, there's a few cases here, a case here, a case there, and eventually something takes hold and it starts to spread, but until then there are these cases
that are missed. Community spread is what a lot of the term that was floating around very early on in the pandemic, and this shows that there really wasn't much of that, despite you know a lot of people anecdotally saying, oh man, I got sick so bad around that time. It sounds just exactly like this. Uh, you know a lot of people were saying that. But even in this kind of study, you know, looking at that data might not have been so true. People still might have just
gotten regular colds around that time. One of the limitations in this study, and something that they wanted to look back into a little bit more, was that they don't really show travel history for these people, these nine people that did have those infections. So I think they wanted to dig in a little bit more to see if they had traveled to China or contact with anybody from there around that time. Also, it's very little actually known about these people and how they might have gotten infected.
What this means is looking back to that period, if you had some symptoms, the chances are that no, you didn't have COVID. But then are the only nine people, right, I mean they may have spread it to one or two other people. There are other people who may have had this, and you know, weren't involved in this study, but it wasn't in such large numbers that it would have been noticed, you know that a hospital would have started noticing they were getting a lot of patients with
the same strange systems as symptoms. Sorry, So it just wasn't big enough at the time. Yeah, And so we got this new data that I know you mentioned in
the article. There was another study that had similar results in just showing that obviously we didn't have the COVID test ready to go when we started seeing the first inklings of it um, so it was kind of expected that we were going to see some of these other infections floating around earlier than some of these first confirmed cases when the test first became available in January, because there wasn't there weren't a lot of tests, and there
weren't a lot of labs that could do it. And then later because there was a problem with the test, the Public Health Authority focused testing on people who had been to China or another country where there was COVID nineteen spreading. So you and others may remember this, people who you know in February thought they had COVID like symptoms, but they hadn't traveled anywhere, and they, you know, hadn't had contact with anyone who was known to have COVID nineteen.
Literally couldn't get a test. Now what we know is there were other people. You didn't have to travel to China, and there were people who weren't terribly ill. So the point or one of the points here is that it is the importance of having a test that's widely available, and not restricting your criteria for the test that anybody with symptoms or who may have had contact should be able to get a test, rather than limiting it to somebody who is in a place where the disease with spreading.
Well for now, like you said, just another piece to this puzzle trying to figure out the earliest days of the pandemic and everything related to it, its origins, all of that we're still finding out more. Betsy McKay, Senior writer at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. It's good to be with you. Thank you. I'm Astar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't
forget the effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast