Numerous Los Angeles patients complained of cough as early as December, the study says

Discussion of the findings highlights how much remains known about the coronavirus that killed at least 187,000 people in the United States, according to the Washington Post analysis.

“This is consistent with the increase in data suggesting that the community is spreading much faster than we expected,” the study author said. Joan Elmore, A doctor and epidemiologist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Researchers investigated a six-year electronic medical record representing approximately 10 million patients in the UCLA medical system from July to February 2014. This includes patient visits to three UCLA hospitals and nearly 200 associated outpatient clinics.

Medical institutions have introduced surveillance systems to detect early signs of disease outbreaks, such as an increasing number of patients checking for fever in hospitals. But medical records were a source of stolen information, Elmore said. “People weren’t paying attention to the outpatient setting,” she said.

The study’s authors searched outpatient and emergency department reports that used the word “cough” and aggregated the number of people hospitalized for acute respiratory failure.

The approach revealed a rise in patients who began the week of December 22 and remained elevated for 10 weeks. The additional population exceeded researchers’ predictions by 50%, increasing the number of cases by about 1,000 compared to the past five influenza seasons.

According to Elmore, influenza cannot be ruled out as the cause of the increase. “And, as you know, we saw a terrible flu bout this year,” she said. But what caused her breaks was that consistently a trend of weeks was seen only in this recent season and not in any other season.

Some experts said they suspected that the coronavirus infection could be the cause of respiratory problems in California. “County-wide data suggests that it actually started to spread in March,” he said. Brad Spellberg, Chief Medical Officer of Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center. I was not involved in any new research.

The virus may have infected a few people earlier than previously reported, but Spellberg said he suspected that a “meaningful infection” had occurred in December or January.

Using data from the emergency department, which reported patients with flu-like illness, Spellberg and his colleagues observed two peaks in patients in December and February. Reported in JAhMAh This spring.

These increases were in line with the severe season of the flu, Spellberg said. The third surge of flu-like illnesses in Los Angeles, this time caused by the coronavirus, occurred later.

Moreover, in the JAMA study, between March 2 and March 18, only 5% of 131 patients with influenza-like illness were coronavirus-positive. Mr Spellberg said that if the virus had a faster foothold in California, he would have expected the rate to be higher. “You would have seen an explosion in the case,” he said.

Understanding how the virus circulates within the population helps refine the epidemiological model of transmission. When the coronavirus spread out of China for the first time, infectious disease scientists and doctors in many pockets of the world are eager.

In late December 2019, Chinese health authorities identified a cluster of viral pneumonia in Wuhan. Researchers sequenced the criminal’s genome, New coronavirus strain, Early January. of First officially reported US incident A man’s coronavirus returned home from Wuhan two weeks later.

Some observations indicate that the virus may have been transmitted earlier and sooner before entering the global pandemic. Research Italian sewage The trace of the virus was revealed in December. Researchers retested men’s nasal swabs hospitalized near Paris until December 27, They detected the coronavirus..

Research author Judith CurrierA doctor at the UCLA epidemic said he would not recommend “antibody testing for asymptomatics” to anyone wondering if they had the virus months ago. Quote guidelines From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“If someone had compatible clinical illnesses, but didn’t get tested for covid in the meantime, an antibody test could help confirm,” she said. “I don’t know the duration of the antibody, but it’s not definitive.”