More Evidence Has Emerged That The Coronavirus Pandemic Started Before China Said It Did As Scientists In California Say They Had Patients With Symptoms Of The Virus Before Christmas Last Year

More evidence has emerged that the coronavirus pandemic started before China said it did as scientists in California say they had patients with symptoms of the virus before Christmas last year.[/news/coronavirus/index.html  ]
Doctors at University of [/news/california/index.html California], Los Angeles (UCLA) Health who scoured millions of old medical records found a spike in admissions with coughs and lung failure beginning in December, which continued through February. 
During those months, there were 50 per cent more of these cases than the hospital system had seen during that period for the previous five years - and they have pointed the finger at Covid-19.
The scientists say that, between December and February, there may have been as many as 1,000 coronavirus patients in Los Angeles. 
The finding is published after only yesterday a British family came forward with a coroner's report saying that their relative, 84-year-old Peter Attwood, died of coronavirus after catching it in December. 
Mr Attwood's death came two months before the first death was officially recorded in Britain and has been officially attributed to the disease, despite China not announcing its existence until after the grandfather had already caught it. 
Beijing has long claimed the disease was first recorded in a market in Wuhan just before Christmas, with the Chinese government not reporting it to the World Health Organisation until December 31. 
But timelines - including traffic reports and aerial images of car parks in Wuhan - now suggest that the virus could have been around for weeks or even months beforehand, kynghidongduong.vn and even infecting travellers.
Los Angeles hospitals saw 50% more coughing patients in December 2019 through February 2020 than in years prior (bottom, orange) and 18 more cases of lung failure than usual (top) 
Nearly 250,000 people in LA have now been diagnosed with COVID-19. 
The populous California county is still seeing nearly 700 new cases a day, although its new daily infections are finally starting to decline, and more than 6,000 people have died of COVID-19 in Los Angeles.
The first official coronavirus case in LA county was identified on January 26, in a 38-year-old man from Wuhan who was only in the city for a layover at LAX with his family on their way home from vacation in Mexico. 
His illness hit suddenly while at the massive airport on January 22, and he asked a customs officer for help.

He was whisked away to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where his location was known to few for weeks, the [ ] reported. 
It was a busy flu season for county hospitals, but for five weeks, the traveller remained the only known coronavirus case in LA. 
A second case wasn't confirmed in the county until March 3.

The next day, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, declared a statewide of emergency. 
But today's study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggests that some of those suspected flu cases keeping the LA emergency rooms busy were actually Covid-19. 
The UCLA team's analyzed more than 10 million patient records from between December 1, tour trương gia giới 2019 and February 29, 2020. 
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The first case of coronavirus in Los Angeles was not detected until January 26, when a passenger flying through LAX (airport pictured; patient not pictured) was whisked away to isolation 
A post-mortem found Peter Attwood, 84, died of the virus in January in the UK, having first suffered symptoms on December 28 - three days before the Chinese government reported the outbreak to the World Health Organisation
Visits to clinics for coughs exceeded the average number of outpatient visits for similar complaints during that same period by more than 50 percent. 
Coughs were cropping up in similarly higher numbers in ERs, tour trương gia giới too. 
And 18 more patients than would have been expected in a typical year had to be hospitalized for acute respiratory failure.   
The researchers noted that, at the time, LA hospitals were also seeing more cases  of cough and respiratory illness suspected of being caused by vaping, although rates  of e-cigarette use had started falling in the county since September 2019. 
'We may never truly know if these excess patients represented early and undetected COVID-19 cases in our area,' said lead study author Dr Joann Elmore, a internal medicine professor at UCLA. 
Emergency rooms (bottom) and outpatient clinics (top) saw a steep spike in visits for cough starting in December 2019 and continuing to February 2020 (blue) 
But her findings suggest that at least some cases of cough and respiratory distress in LA were linked to the pandemic - and keeping an eye out for similar upticks could help health officials identify outbreaks of COVID-19.  
'The pandemic has really highlighted our need for agile health care analytics that enable real-time symptom and disease surveillance using electronic health records data,' said Dr Michael Pfeffer, a study co-author and chief information officer for UCLA Health. 
'Technology, including artificial intelligence powered by machine learning, has further potential to identify and track irregular changes in health data, including significant excesses of patients with specific disease-type presentations in the weeks or months prior to an outbreak.' 
It comes after a post-mortem found that an 84-year-old man in Britain died of the virus in January - two months before the first fatality was officially reported.
Beijing has long claimed the virus was first recorded in a wet market in Wuhan just before Christmas, with the Chinese government not reporting it to the World Health Organisation until December 31.
However, the death of Peter Attwood, 84, from Chatham, Kent, has raised new questions about an alleged Chinese cover-up after it emerged he had symptoms of the virus on December 28, with his daughter falling ill two weeks earlier. 
Jane Buckland, 46, says her father's death suggests the virus could have been spreading in Britain as early as November and added: 'If China hadn't lied to the rest of the world and kept this hidden for so long, it could have saved countless lives.'
Tory former leader Iain Duncan Smith told DailyMail.com: 'This shows that there has been a major cover up in China over this from the word go.
'There needs now to be a full investigation both into the role of China in the covering up of this virus and its human to human transfer capabilities, and questions need to asked about an inquiry into the behaviour of the WHO.
'Once they knew there was a problem why didn't they go public with it?'
Initially, the virus was thought to have come from bats sold at a livestock market in Wuhan, before scientists and politicians - most notably US President Donald Trump - accused the Chinese government of hiding the fact that it came from a Wuhan virology lab.
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS health" data-version="2" id="mol-cd45edd0-f38a-11ea-ba0a-31da57d50d87" website may have been in LA before CHRISTMAS, study suggests