Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, June. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive
Speaker 1: podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. A
Speaker 1: new study done by the National Institutes of Health is
Speaker 1: showing that in five states some people were infected with
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen before those states recorded their first cases. Blood
Speaker 1: samples collected between January and March of were tested for
Speaker 1: anybody's Out of thousand samples, nine came back positive. Betsy McKay,
Speaker 1: senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for more.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us today, Betsy, thanks for having We
Speaker 1: have a new research study that was done by the
Speaker 1: National Institutes of Health that turned up evidence of a
Speaker 1: possible coronavirus infection in the United States, multiple ones, actually
Speaker 1: as early as December, maybe sometime around Christmas time. And
Speaker 1: so these are all weeks before the first documented infections
Speaker 1: in the country and and and even in those particular
Speaker 1: states as well. Uh So, Betsy, walk us through some
Speaker 1: of this. What do we what are we learning? So,
Speaker 1: the n i H has a big research program that
Speaker 1: you and the listeners may have heard of, called the
Speaker 1: All of Us Research Program, and its goal is to
Speaker 1: enroll a million people across the country of diverse backgrounds,
Speaker 1: and through the database that they built on that to
Speaker 1: study risk factors for disease and treatments and so forth.
Speaker 1: They're building this big database of blood samples and so
Speaker 1: forth from people volunteers who enroll. So what they decided
Speaker 1: to do is use the blood samples that they have
Speaker 1: collected so far to look at this kind of growing
Speaker 1: question of interest. You know, how early did the pandemic
Speaker 1: reach US shores? When when did people first start getting sick?
Speaker 1: Because we know the first person to be you know,
Speaker 1: formally diagnosed was in late January, around January nineteen, but
Speaker 1: that was right after a test became available. So the
Speaker 1: CDC Center Starch the Zoo Control Prevention developed the test,
Speaker 1: it's made available in its lab and boom, two days later,
Speaker 1: someone has this. So that raises a question as well,
Speaker 1: are they really the first person or not. So these
Speaker 1: researchers went through and tested blood samples going back to
Speaker 1: the beginning of January. As you mentioned, this program had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with COVID. We didn't really know about
Speaker 1: it then, So this is just a program that had
Speaker 1: been ongoing. I think out of two thousand, a little
Speaker 1: over twenty four thousand participants, they found evidence of infection
Speaker 1: in just nine people. That suggests a number of different things.
Speaker 1: What they did find though, also is that in five
Speaker 1: states Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they had people
Speaker 1: that have showed evidence of infection and that was all
Speaker 1: before you know, anybody had gotten in those first states,
Speaker 1: big areas like California and New York, there was no
Speaker 1: infections that turned up at least in the in these
Speaker 1: blood samples. What they found was that people, you know,
Speaker 1: they looked at blood samples going back into early January,
Speaker 1: and what they were looking for with antibodies in the blood.
Speaker 1: These are blood samples that were taken at the time
Speaker 1: and then they're frozen and stored for research later. So
Speaker 1: the researchers go back, they test the bloods for antibodies
Speaker 1: using two different tests to make sure that it really
Speaker 1: is the COVID nineteen virus called stars Kobe two and
Speaker 1: not something else. So they found, you know, one person
Speaker 1: on January seven, one person on January eight, and that
Speaker 1: the antibodies they found normally start to appear about two
Speaker 1: weeks after someone is infected, so that means those two
Speaker 1: people one in Illinois and one in Massachusetts were likely
Speaker 1: infected round December December twenty four or maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit earlier. Then they went later in time through March,
Speaker 1: and you know, twenty four thousand samples, as you said,
Speaker 1: you only found nine cases. So what that shows is
Speaker 1: that certainly the virus was here earlier than we knew before,
Speaker 1: and a couple of studies have shown that now, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't, you know, not in large numbers. I mean,
Speaker 1: these were kind of like sporadic cases, and that happens
Speaker 1: often with infectious to these is you know, something that
Speaker 1: causes an outbreak, there's a few cases here, a case here,
Speaker 1: a case there, and eventually something takes hold and it
Speaker 1: starts to spread, but until then there are these cases
Speaker 1: that are missed. Community spread is what a lot of
Speaker 1: the term that was floating around very early on in
Speaker 1: the pandemic, and this shows that there really wasn't much
Speaker 1: of that, despite you know a lot of people anecdotally saying,
Speaker 1: oh man, I got sick so bad around that time.
Speaker 1: It sounds just exactly like this. Uh, you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people were saying that. But even in this
Speaker 1: kind of study, you know, looking at that data might
Speaker 1: not have been so true. People still might have just
Speaker 1: gotten regular colds around that time. One of the limitations
Speaker 1: in this study, and something that they wanted to look
Speaker 1: back into a little bit more, was that they don't
Speaker 1: really show travel history for these people, these nine people
Speaker 1: that did have those infections. So I think they wanted
Speaker 1: to dig in a little bit more to see if
Speaker 1: they had traveled to China or contact with anybody from
Speaker 1: there around that time. Also, it's very little actually known
Speaker 1: about these people and how they might have gotten infected.
Speaker 1: What this means is looking back to that period, if
Speaker 1: you had some symptoms, the chances are that no, you
Speaker 1: didn't have COVID. But then are the only nine people, right,
Speaker 1: I mean they may have spread it to one or
Speaker 1: two other people. There are other people who may have
Speaker 1: had this, and you know, weren't involved in this study,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't in such large numbers that it would
Speaker 1: have been noticed, you know that a hospital would have
Speaker 1: started noticing they were getting a lot of patients with
Speaker 1: the same strange systems as symptoms. Sorry, So it just
Speaker 1: wasn't big enough at the time. Yeah, And so we
Speaker 1: got this new data that I know you mentioned in
Speaker 1: the article. There was another study that had similar results
Speaker 1: in just showing that obviously we didn't have the COVID
Speaker 1: test ready to go when we started seeing the first
Speaker 1: inklings of it um, so it was kind of expected
Speaker 1: that we were going to see some of these other
Speaker 1: infections floating around earlier than some of these first confirmed
Speaker 1: cases when the test first became available in January, because
Speaker 1: there wasn't there weren't a lot of tests, and there
Speaker 1: weren't a lot of labs that could do it. And
Speaker 1: then later because there was a problem with the test,
Speaker 1: the Public Health Authority focused testing on people who had
Speaker 1: been to China or another country where there was COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen spreading. So you and others may remember this, people
Speaker 1: who you know in February thought they had COVID like symptoms,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't traveled anywhere, and they, you know, hadn't
Speaker 1: had contact with anyone who was known to have COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: Literally couldn't get a test. Now what we know is
Speaker 1: there were other people. You didn't have to travel to China,
Speaker 1: and there were people who weren't terribly ill. So the
Speaker 1: point or one of the points here is that it
Speaker 1: is the importance of having a test that's widely available,
Speaker 1: and not restricting your criteria for the test that anybody
Speaker 1: with symptoms or who may have had contact should be
Speaker 1: able to get a test, rather than limiting it to
Speaker 1: somebody who is in a place where the disease with spreading.
Speaker 1: Well for now, like you said, just another piece to
Speaker 1: this puzzle trying to figure out the earliest days of
Speaker 1: the pandemic and everything related to it, its origins, all
Speaker 1: of that we're still finding out more. Betsy McKay, Senior
Speaker 1: writer at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much
Speaker 1: for joining us. It's good to be with you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm Astar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't
Speaker 1: forget the effort today's big news stories. You can check
Speaker 1: me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday.
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