Six Americans died from Covid in January 2020

I should have highlighted this Mercury News exclusive years ago. This article provides even more evidence that “early spread” in America should not be viewed as an insignificant 'theory.'

Except for the grace of God and for being a Covid patient before the Covid hospital protocols were enacted, Tim McCain of my state could have been considered the world’s first victim of Covid-19.

Author’s note:

While I might be considered Substack’s “early spread” author, for some inexplicable reason (until today) I’ve neglected to present powerful evidence that might further confirm that this “theory” should actually be considered as a “fact.”

Four years ago, The San Jose Mercury News published a blockbuster exclusive story, documenting that six Americans apparently died from Covid in January 2020. All six deaths, recorded on death certificates, happened weeks before the first “official Covid death” in America and, some even before the first reported Covid death in Wuhan, China.

Furthermore, an official from the CDC’s National Center for Health statistics considers these deaths to almost-certainly be caused by Covid.

***

Reading about “early” Covid deaths did not surprise me as I’ve long suspected that many people must have died from Covid in the winter of 2019-2020, pre-“official” Covid.

While I’ve long argued that Covid is not a “deadly” virus, I’ve never meant this literally. What I meant is that the huge number of deaths attributed to Covid must be vastly exaggerated. Just like with the flu, the vast majority of people who contract this virus will survive any illness it may cause.

However, I do know this respiratory virus can and no doubt has caused many deaths (even if these fatalities probably wouldn’t produce a noticeable spike in “all-cause deaths.”)

I’d remind readers that I began my “early spread” research by writing an in-depth feature story on Tim McCain of Sylacauga, Alabama.

Tim, 39 at the time, first exhibited definite Covid symptoms the day after Christmas 2019. By January 3rd, Tim’s wife took him to the emergency room where he was then rushed in critical condition to a hospital in Birmingham.

Tim spent almost a month in the ICU and, per his wife, nearly died several times, including on January 3, 4th and 5th, 2020. While Tim was fortunate to survive, it’s always occurred to me that other people suffering the same symptoms and clinical markers must not have survived.

Tim and his wife both later tested positive for Covid antibodies and the director of ICU nursing later told Brandie McCain her husband “definitely” had Covid. If Tim had died in the first few days of January 2020 and if public health agencies had done their jobs, a resident of a small, rural Alabama town could have been considered the first Covid fatality in the world.

However, I have no doubt many Americans passed away from severe cases of this virus much earlier than Tim. Since nobody had heard of Covid-19 in November, December 2019 and early January 2020 - and there was no testing at the time - these deaths were simply attributed to pneumonia, the flu or any number of other causes.

***

I’ve re-printed The Mercury News article and also added excerpts from several other articles on a story that did NOT produce the national buzz one might have expected. I added a few editorial comments to highlight how the significance of early spread has been almost completely ignored.

Boldfaced text was added by myself for emphasis.

Mercury News Exclusive from August 2021 - Covid deaths began much earlier than Americans thought

By EMILY DERUY

Aug. 22, 2021 - In a significant twist that could reshape our understanding of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, death records now indicate the first COVID-related deaths in California and across the country occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than originally thought and before officials knew the virus was circulating here.

A half dozen death certificates from that month in six different states — California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus's deadly path quickly reached far beyond coastal regions that were the country's early known hotspots.

Up until now, the Feb. 6, 2020, death of San Jose's Patricia Dowd had been considered the country's first coronavirus fatality, although where and how she was infected remains unknown. Even less is known about what are now believed to be the country's earliest victims of the pandemic.

The Bay Area News Group discovered evidence of them in provisional coronavirus death counts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) — widely considered the definitive source for death data in the United States — and confirmed the information through interviews with state and federal public health officials.

But amid privacy concerns and fierce debate over pandemic policies, the names, precise locations and circumstances behind these deaths have not been publicly revealed.

That is frustrating to some experts.

"We need to sit back and really assess what was this thing, when it started, how did we handle it, did we create more of a problem than we needed to, could we have handled things differently?" said Matthew Memoli, director of the clinical studies unit at the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "There's a lot to think about here."

For instance, the far-flung nature of the deaths — in the West, Midwest and South — might suggest that restrictions on travel and social interactions should have been used in more places much earlier — and that such rapid response could be a more critical tool in the next pandemic.

In January, when the United States announced it would begin limiting travel from China and other international hotspots, the virus may already have been speeding across state borders.

While California, Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma acknowledged or didn't dispute that a death certificate in their states from January 2020 had been changed to include COVID-19, none of the states would provide further details to reporters from this news organization, citing privacy laws.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services now lists the probable COVID-19 death of a 50-59-year-old woman on Jan. 22, 2020, in its data.

Kansas did not respond to a request for comment.

This new data appears to be the result of months-long efforts by so-called certifiers — the coroners, medical examiners and doctors across the country tasked with explaining when and why people die — to take a closer look at deaths that occurred in the months before the outbreak.

The Bay Area News Group first reported in April that the CDC was investigating why multiple COVID-related fatalities before Dowd's death began appearing earlier this year in state and federal records. At the time, most of those were explained away as incorrect dates and other data glitches.

But this past week, the federal agency told this news organization that it had worked with state officials to contact the certifiers in five cases — while waiting to hear back from a sixth — and confirmed that death certificates from January 2020 have now been intentionally revised to include COVID-19.

"Certifiers are reluctant to amend death certificates unless there's a good reason to do so," said Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the NCHS.

But what led a coroner or doctor to make such a significant and possibly historic change in these cases is unclear. Anderson, whose team collects death data from every state, said his agency isn't provided that level of detail.

(My question: Why is such important information “unclear” to major public health agencies seeking to date the first cases and deaths of Covid-19 and why wouldn’t the country’s most important public health agencies be given “this level of detail?”)

When someone dies for unknown reasons, death certificates can be updated months and even years after a person has died to reflect new information. During the pandemic, a coroner who originally attributed an early 2020 death broadly to a respiratory virus might later learn the person had traveled to China, where the virus originated, or had contact with someone who had, and reach the conclusion that they had COVID-19.

(Bill Rice, Jr. comment: Why is the author so certain the pandemic “originated” in China if cases and deaths in America pre-date the first cases and deaths reported in China?)

Coronavirus testing was not common in early 2020, but if health workers took blood at the time, a medical examiner could later test the sample for the virus or antibodies, or do a PCR test for the virus on a tissue sample if an autopsy was performed.

Expert: Cases were initially written off as colds or the flu ….

It's likely, said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, that these early cases were initially written off as colds or flus.

… The existence of January 2020 deaths would dramatically revise the timeline of COVID-19's arrival in the United States.

China first announced a mysterious viral pneumonia in late December 2019, and reported the first death from the illness on Jan. 9, 2020. The U.S. originally recorded its first case in mid-January, when a traveler tested positive after returning from Wuhan, China.

The first deaths reported in the United States, in late February, were also tied to travel. In its current death count, which reflects the six newly discovered fatalities, the NCHS now lists the country's first COVID-19 death during the week of Jan. 5-11 — the first full week of 2020. (Note: Before the first death in China).

The agency is in the final stages of preparing its 2020 annual mortality report, a review and analysis of all deaths in the United States last year. Swartzberg thinks — and the new death data suggests — it's entirely possible that COVID-19 was present in the United States as early as December or even November.

(Note: I’ve identified scores of Americans who, based on symptoms and later positive antibody tests, had Covid in November 2019, if not earlier).

The time from infection to death from COVID-19 is typically around three weeks.

"I would certainly guess the virus was introduced on multiple occasions before it was identified as a problem," Swartzberg said, noting that states like Alabama and Oklahoma don't generally see a lot of travel to and from China.

Memoli of the National Institutes of Health agrees. "I always thought it had to have been here in the U.S. well before we identified it as a big problem," Memoli said. His team is studying thousands of people across the country and their research suggests that by July 2020, there were about five unidentified cases for every known case and possibly more.

(My comment: I think there were thousands of unidentified cases for every “known” case. This, IMO, would explain why an unprecedented 2,886 U.S. schools closed “due to excessive illnesses” between November 2019 and early February 2020).

That information may also suggest, Memoli said, the virus was spreading earlier than previously thought. So too does a CDC analysis of thousands of blood samples from nine states. The samples, collected by the American Red Cross in December 2019 and January 2020, found evidence of antibodies to COVID-19 in all nine states, but there is no record of whether any of those people got sick or died.

(Bill Rice Jr comment: This is because the CDC did not interview any of the 106 blood donors who tested positive for antibodies, which I believe is a clear case of professional incompetence, malfeasance or malpractice. Also, since the first tranche of Red Cross blood was collected Dec. 13-16, 2019 and it can take at least two weeks for detectable antibodies to form, this suggests most if not all of these donors must have been infected in November 2019, if not earlier).

States won’t “confirm” early cases or early deaths …

Some states, including California, are choosing not to recognize the amended death certificates in their official COVID-19 death counts, however.

The California Department of Public Health acknowledged in a statement to this news organization that a death certificate from January 2020 now lists COVID-19 as a significant condition contributing to death. "However," the department said, "there was no laboratory confirmation of COVID for this individual and as such is not a confirmed COVID death.”

(Bill Rice, Jr. comment: I’ve repeatedly highlighted the fact that officials seem to be unwilling to “confirm” early Covid “cases” (even when someone obviously had all the signature Covid symptoms and later tested positive for antibodies. Today’s article highlights a similar unwillingness to “confirm” early Covid deaths).

Anderson, whose agency is tabulating the country's official death count, sees it differently.

"The death certificate is the permanent record for the decedent," he said. "If COVID is on the death certificate, then it is a COVID death. You can't just ignore it."

The system for tracking mortality data, he said, relies on the medical expertise of death certifiers, since the CDC compiles records on approximately 3 million deaths in the U.S. every year. In their months-long review before finalizing the data for publication, the CDC follows up on anything out of the ordinary, like these early COVID-19 deaths, to make sure there were no unintentional errors made by the certifiers or during data entry.

But experts say a deeper analysis is needed. For instance, it might be possible, depending on what evidence remains, to examine the viral characteristics in the six early deaths and determine the origin of the strains and whether they were related. The CDC wouldn't comment on whether it was conducting such an investigation.

(My comment: More “transparency” from the CDC. Also, no public health agency “followed up” on Tim McCain’s near Covid death.)

Memoli, for one, is convinced a closer look could inform how the United States responds to future public health crises. "There are things about the 1918 flu pandemic we still don't completely understand and we try to dig up information from that time to try to better understand it and prepare for the future," he said. "We have a lot of work to do in trying to understand."

***

More details of the Kansas resident who passed away Jan. 9, 2020

A follow-up story by The Mercury News published September 2, 2021.

***

Sept 2, 2021 - LEAVENWORTH, Kansas — Peaches Foster’s mother, Lovell “Cookie” Brown, died in a hospital on Jan. 9, 2020, in the middle of America, 7,200 miles from Wuhan, China, and weeks before the world understood that a mysterious respiratory virus was circling the globe and threatening humanity.

But on Wednesday afternoon, when a clerk slid her mother’s amended death certificate through the opening in the window at the vital statistics office in Topeka, Kansas, Foster finally learned what she had long suspected: “It’s COVID. I knew it,” she said, then burst into tears.

That’s how she discovered her mother is now listed as the first known person in the United States to die with COVID-19.

Three months ago, Brown’s doctor quietly added “COVID 19 PNEUMONIA” as one of the causes of her death, not only amending her death record but also effectively rewriting the timeline of when the pandemic reached the United States.

For more than a year, the Feb. 6, 2020, death of a San Jose woman named Patricia Dowd was considered the U.S.’s first COVID-19 death. So how, nearly a month earlier, on the same day that the World Health Organization first reported a novel coronavirus was responsible for China’s outbreak, does a 78-year-old great-grandmother in Leavenworth, Kansas, enter this story?

A Bay Area News Group investigation published last month revealed at least five death certificates from January 2020 in five states — California, Oklahoma, Alabama, Wisconsin and Kansas — had been amended in recent months to include COVID-19 as a factor. Kansas’ was the earliest.

The puzzling revisions not only appear to turn the clock back on the virus’ arrival in the U.S. but also suggest that it had surfaced much sooner in America’s heartland, far beyond the country’s early coastal hotspots.

It remains a mystery when or where Brown, a devout Jehovah’s Witness whose life revolved around her tight-knit family, may have contracted the deadly virus. It’s also unclear why her doctor — who has yet to explain his decision — took the extraordinary step to change her death certificate more than a year later.

In the days and weeks before her death at Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, Lovell Brown had a splitting headache, a raspy cough, a fever, diarrhea, body aches and other symptoms that would soon become all too familiar across the world.

And at Christmas, when her family brought her favorite foods to the nursing home, Brown complained that everything tasted bland. The cabbage needed salt. The scratch-made spaghetti sauce was off. The water tasted of bleach.

Days later, she was rushed from her home of more than 30 years in northern Leavenworth to nearby Saint John Hospital gasping for air before being transferred to Providence, where she spent a week in the intensive care unit fighting for her life before dying midafternoon, surrounded by loved ones.

Brown’s original death certificate said she’d died only from a stroke and chronic obstructive lung disease. But in May of this year, that changed.

Why is still a mystery. Her death is now included in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official record of U.S. COVID deaths, but the agency wouldn’t comment further.

John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, said it may never be possible to know whether Brown had COVID-19 without tissue or blood samples.

It’s not yet clear whether any samples remain, and Brown was cremated shortly after her death. But the symptoms and timeline of her illness fit the usual pattern, he said, so it’s entirely possible she was infected.

While many of the early identified COVID-19 cases involved travel to and from Asia, not all did. And both experts and antibody studies of donated blood samples suggest the virus was already spreading in the U.S. by late 2019.

What prompted a doctor to go back a year and a half later and change the death certificate? Swartzberg asked. “That’s the elephant in the room.”

It’s rare for death certificates to be amended, experts say. When reached by a reporter Wednesday on his cellphone, Thomas Fulbright, the ICU physician who certified Brown’s amended death certificate, said he couldn’t talk about the case because of patient privacy rules.

A spokesperson for Providence hospital, Sam Allred, said he also couldn’t provide specifics but promised to help Brown’s family get a better understanding of what happened.

“We’ll work with her to try to get any answers we can,” Allred said.

Two more stories on the same subject …

From The Wisconsin Examiner: COVID-19 appeared earlier in Wisconsin, elsewhere than previously thought

BY ERIK GUNN

August 25, 2021 - A Wisconsin woman who died in January 2020 is one of six people across the country whose deaths have been retroactively linked to COVID-19, suggesting the coronavirus turned up in parts of the country earlier than originally believed.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that death certificates in six states “have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus’s deadly path quickly reached beyond coastal regions that were the country’s early known hotspots.”

The added Wisconsin death occurred Jan. 22, 2020, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) database that tracks all known infections and deaths from the coronavirus. The Mercury News reported that the death involved a woman between 50 and 59 years old.

The Wisconsin Examiner asked DHS officials to comment on the death and its potential significance in understanding the spread of the virus in the state, but the department has not yet made anyone available to discuss it.

(My comment: More transparency from a public health agency.)

In addition to Wisconsin, the other five states with updated information are Alabama, California, Georgia, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The New York Times published a story as well …

(Bill Rice, Jr. comment: IMO the following article is a peculiar treatment of what should have been an explosive finding … or this is perhaps an effort to spin the story as non-credible or insignificant. (See link here.)

***

September 9, 2021 - Late last year, the federal government’s chief statistician on death received word about a tantalizing discovery: Someone had died from Covid-19 in January 2020, a death certificate said, a revelation that would have sped up the timeline of the virus’s spread in the United States by several weeks.

That death was ultimately not what it seemed. The person who certified it had meant June 2020, not January. But that blip on the radar screen of Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helped to kick off a quiet, yearlong campaign at the agency to check and recheck the country’s first suspected Covid-related deaths in the uncertain days of early 2020.

Now, at least four possible Covid-19 deaths from January 2020 have survived Dr. Anderson’s vetting. Spread out across four states, they have become part of a scattershot collection of clues about the virus’s early spread beyond China — some of them trustworthy, others less so — that have begun drawing more attention as scientists and intelligence officials try to unravel how the pandemic began.

The odds that all four of the C.D.C.’s new death cases — from Kansas, California, Alabama and Wisconsin — really did result from Covid-19 are slim, some scientists said.

This year, a doctor or another official certifier reclassified them as being Covid-related. But whether they did so solely on the basis of the person’s symptoms, or with the help of more useful blood or tissue samples, is not clear.

(My comment: Again, nothing is “clear” in this “year-long investigation.”)

The earliest death, on Jan. 9, 2020, in Kansas, was reclassified this spring on the basis of the person’s symptoms alone, the state health department said, putting the onus on a doctor to evaluate how closely the patient’s disease matched the symptoms of Covid-19. The most common symptoms of the virus, including a fever, difficulty breathing and even a loss of taste or smell, overlap with symptoms of other respiratory illnesses.

In a sign of how difficult it can be to recategorize long-ago deaths, C.D.C. records include a fifth Covid-related death from January 2020, in Oklahoma. But after state officials investigated, the medical examiner removed Covid-19 from the death certificate, Oklahoma’s health department said on Wednesday, meaning that it will probably soon fall off of the C.D.C.’s records, too.

It is not clear whether any of the suspected cases had traveled to China.

“My guess is that they’re probably not all real, maybe not even any of them,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. It’s highly unlikely that any of the people caught the virus in the United States, he said, but it’s possible that some had recently been to China. “If any of them are real, they’d be travel-linked cases, and that’s conceivable,” he said.

(My comment: Re-stated, according to this expert, it’s inconceivable any American who hadn’t been to China in December 2019 or January could get Covid.)

Dr. Worobey’s research, including close analyses of viral genomes and epidemic simulations, has indicated that the virus was unlikely to be spreading outside of China before mid-December 2019, making non-traveler deaths in the United States the following month doubtful, he said. Several weeks typically pass between someone getting infected and dying, and any given case is unlikely to be fatal.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Dr. Worobey said.

For Dr. Anderson, the trustworthiness of the January 2020 deaths is not only a public health concern, but also a personal preoccupation.

A demographer by training who landed at the C.D.C. in 1996 after staring down a treacherous academic job market, Dr. Anderson said that certain deaths had an outsize impact, statistically speaking. And that includes Covid deaths early in the pandemic.

When states submit Covid-19 death numbers, the C.D.C. normally takes them at face value, as it does for hundreds of thousands of deaths from heart disease or cancer any given year. The agency recorded nearly three million registered deaths in 2019, and a mistake here or there does not change the country’s overall picture of mortality, Dr. Anderson said.

Not so for a possible Covid death at the dawn of a pandemic. At the time, testing was scarce. Until The Mercury News in California recently reported on the possible cases from January 2020, the earliest suspected Covid-related fatality was not until Feb. 6, 2020.

(My Comment: I had been reporting on possible early cases since April of 2020 and even even emailed my information to The New York Times … multiple times.)

When Dr. Anderson is notified of Covid-related deaths from the first two months of 2020, he calls state health officials, who in turn ask for verification from the doctor or medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

In January of this year, for instance, the C.D.C. received a flurry of reports of people having died from Covid-19 in January 2020. Or so they said. Further checking revealed that most doctors had simply forgotten to start writing 2021 next to their signatures.

In another case this summer, Dr. Anderson confirmed that a medical certifier had meant to reclassify a January 2020 death as Covid-related, only for that certifier to backtrack once the state health department intervened.

… Ultimately, though, without access to patient samples or medical records, the C.D.C. has to trust the people who sign Covid-19 death certificates, he said.

“I can’t say for sure these are all accurate,” Dr. Anderson said of the January 2020 deaths. “But I think it unlikely that certifiers would have capriciously changed the death certificate.”

Most Covid-19 deaths are straightforward to certify, said Marcus Nashelsky, a professor of pathology at the University of Iowa who helped the C.D.C. write guidelines about how to attribute such deaths.

For example, early in the pandemic, when nursing home patients were not always being tested, he said, a known outbreak in the home, in combination with characteristic symptoms and signs of the virus, could be enough for a doctor to declare a Covid-related death.

Nevertheless, death certificates have become hotly contested documents during the pandemic.

In some cases, disbelieving families have asked that someone’s death certificate be wiped of any mention of Covid-19, said James Gill, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner and the president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. In others, families have urged that Covid-19 be added to a death certificate, seemingly in an effort to become eligible for funeral funding under a federal assistance program, he said. (Note: The Covid funeral benefit was as much as $9,000).

“It’s a very emotional thing for some families, whether or not they want it on the death certificate,” Dr. Gill said. “It shouldn’t be. It’s a public health matter.”

In spring 2020, Dr. Gill said, he became concerned that Connecticut was overlooking Covid-19 deaths, especially among nursing home residents whose complicated medical histories can sometimes obscure causes of death. In a few hundred cases, he said, the medical examiner’s office conducted deep nasal swabs on bodies at funeral homes. The team found a number of cases.

With China refusing to share more information about its own early cases, the World Health Organization recently said that it was helping researchers dig into reports of cases in late 2019 outside of China.

(My comment: Nobody from the WHO has ever contacted me about my voluminous “early spread research.”)

In Italy, researchers have reported coronavirus antibodies in blood samples from September 2019, as well as signs of the virus in a patient’s skin sample from November of that year. Some scientists, though, have questioned both findings.

“The further back you can go, the more informative it may be — if you do have true, confirmed cases,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist whose lab retested the Italian blood samples and could not confirm the earliest cases. She added, “For declaring a much earlier introduction of the pandemic virus into a region, you have to have a high level of certainty.”

An analysis of American blood tests published this summer suggested that the virus may have been circulating in Illinois as early as Dec. 24, 2019, though scientists have said that those methods, too, are fallible.

(My comment: Note the NY Times doesn’t mention the “Red Cross Blood study,” which would date many cases in up to nine states to November 2019).

Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of that study, said that small clusters of cases could have developed without igniting a full-blown epidemic. “Where Covid was seeded in the U.S. is not fully known,” she said, “but it wasn’t likely to have been a single seed.”

Final comments:

Except for the story on the death of Kansas’s “Cookie” Brown, none of these stories list names of decedents (or doctors), details which would allow other reporters or researchers to follow-up on these possible likely cases and deaths.

Mrs. Brown was apparently experiencing Covid symptoms prior to Christmas 2019 (the same time as Tim and Brandie McCain in Sylacauga, Alabama). This means some unknown person infected her earlier in December 2019 and some unknown person must have infected this unknown person.

This would strongly suggest that Covid was spreading (and indeed killing people) in the heartland of America weeks or months before the first reported cases in Wuhan, China.

The above articles list six states where people reportedly died from Covid. My “early spread” reporting adds approximately 15 other states where I’ve identified citizens who later tested positive for Covid antibodies and, in many known cases, report experiencing definite Covid symptoms in November and December 2019.

My supposition is that if Americans in at least 21 states had been infected with this “contagious” virus, one can be confident that Americans in all 50 states had contracted Covid by the same time period.

I’ve now identified almost-certain cases from California, Washington and Oregon on the West Coast to New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts on the East Coast to North Carolina and South Carolina on the Eastern Seaboard to Florida, Alabama and Georgia in the Deep South, plus Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin and Illinois in the middle sections of the country.

To me, this connotes a virus that had already “spread widely” across America by November and December 2019.

Based only on the Red Cross antibody study and the six “Covid deaths” listed on death certificates (and not even including the dozens of cases I’ve identified from my research), “early spread” in America should no longer be labeled a theory or a hypothesis, but as an apparent, undeniable fact.

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