The research found an increase in hospital visits by patients who reported respiratory illness.
The deadly coronavirus has circulated in the US as early as December 2019 which is a month prior to the expected month as predicted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the researchers from UCLA, a strategically huge number of hospital visits were noticed in the month of December last year where the maximum patients have reported respiratory illnesses. These cases were reported as early as December 22.
The first officially known coronavirus case in the US was thought to be a patient in Washington who had visited Wuhan in China earlier. This case was reported in January by the CDC.
The researchers have looked through nearly 10 million medical records from the UCLA health system which include three hospitals and 180 clinics.
One of the researchers said that she kept receiving a number of emails from her patients in March asking if the cough they got in January was related to COVID-19.
Reportedly, she has found a 50 percent increase in the number of patients coming to the hospital complaining cough.
Through this research, the exerts hoped that their realtime data would help the health experts identify and track emerging outbreaks much earlier to either slow or stop the spread of the disease.
Dr. Claudia, an infectious disease specialist at University hospitals at Cleveland Medical center who did not work on the study said that the possible COVID-19 cases may have started much earlier than the first case that was officially realized.
This research paper is picking up curious signals and the hospitalizations are more likely from flu or other respiratory diseases.
Compared to all the past five year records, the number of patients visited to the hospitals for the respiratory complaints as well as the number of people hospitalized due to respiratory failure between December 2019 and February 2020 were soared up.
The uptick in the cases stated in the final week of December as per the research conducted by these researchers.
However, a professor at Scripps Research from immunology and microbiology department has disagreed the statement and said that according to the coronavirus’ genetic data, the pandemic started in late November or early December in 2019 which makes it impossible for the pandemic to have started in the US much earlier than that in China.
It is yet to prove the claims from these researchers by the health experts.
By Gayatri Yellayi
