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[/news/coronavirus/index.html Coronavirus] was likely spreading in much of the U.S.
last December - weeks before China told the officially recognized the new virus, a new study suggests. 
Blood collected by the Red Cross between December 13 and January 17 was later sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ([/news/centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention-cdc/index.html CDC]) to be tested for antibodies to coronavirus. 
Testing revealed antibodies to the virus that causes COVID-19 in 39 samples from blood donated between December 13 and December 16.

Those donations were made in [/news/california/index.html California], Oregon, and Washington. 
Another 67 samples taken between December 30 and January 17 from donors in the Midwest and Northeast were positive for antibodies, according to the Wa[#



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The first U.S. case of coronavirus was not reported until January 19.  
It was only 12 day earlier, on January 8, that the World Health Organization (WHO) said the bizarre pneumonia sickening people in China was likely caused by an altogether new virus.  
Chinese authorities have notified the WHO of a cluster of unexplained illnesses on December 31.  The virus was isolated and its genetic makeup was sequence by January 7. 
At that time, both the Chinese government and the WHO were urging calm, insisting that the virus was only spreading from people who had symptoms and did not pose a major threat to people outside China's Hubei Province. 
Even the first case identified in the U.S.

- in a Washington state man who had recently returned from China - was not an indication that coronavirus was going to take hold in the U.S., officials said at the time. 
We now know that it already was taking hold. 
Previous genetic sequencing studies have shown that coronavirus was likely already on both coasts of the U.S.

by mid- to late-January, starting to circulate in broader communities in February. 
But testing of blood donated to the Red Cross confirms what the studies of coronavirus genomes suggested: COVID-19 was here, tour đi thái lan long before Americans knew it. 
The new study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, tested samples from 7,389 blood donations for antibodies to the virus. 



Antibodies were present in 106 - 1.4 percent - of the donations collected between mid-December and mid-January. 
The use of antibodies to assess how prevalent the virus is has been questioned. 
Antibodies fade over time, with some studies suggesting that they become undetectable within two or three months of infection.  
There is also the possibility that blood could react to testing if someone had antibodies to one of the hundreds of other types of coronaviruses in the environment. 
But 90 of the Red Cross samples were tested for antibodies very specific to SARS-CoV-2 - immune proteins that the scientists had made sure were not cross-reactive with test for other coronaviruses. 
Of the 90, 84 samples were positive for these very specific antibodies. 
In the batch of samples taken from later blood donations - made between December 17 and December 30, the scientist found that 67 were positive for coronavirus antibodies. 
These samples came from donors in Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin or Iowa and Connecticut or Rhode Island. 
So not only was coronaviru already on the West Coast before the first U.S.

case was confirmed there, it was already in states on the other side of the country before the Washington patient was identified. 
President Trump was perhaps the most promise voice in a chorus that blamed China for tour thái lan 'covering up' the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in the early days of the pandemic's global spread. 
China's Communist Party has a poor track record for disease outbreaks and transparency.   
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox health" data-version="2" id="mol-b6d07180-341a-11eb-8974-6f898e53e517" website was spreading in the US by December 17, study finds