To many, February feels like years ago. Restaurants and department stores remained open, college students sat side by side in lecture halls, and March Madness brackets were still a possibility.
Times may not have been so different, after all.
Recent research from Northeastern University, which was shared with The New York Times, showed that even when the world was focused on China and Italy, a hidden outbreak may already have been sweeping through the United States.
Original models showed 23 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of March 1 in five major U.S. cities: New York, Seattle, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
Now the estimates show that an estimated 28,000 infections were silently sweeping those cities by then.
To Dr. Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, those numbers “don’t seem surprising at all.”
“We weren’t testing, and if you’re not testing, you don’t know,” Heguy said.
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Political conversations during the silent spread mostly centered around whether the U.S. outbreak would even be serious, according to Northeastern research team leader Alessandro Vespignani.
“Meanwhile, in the background, you have this silent chain of transmission of thousands of people,” he said.
This finding was announced the day after California officials announced a COVID-19-related death on Feb. 6, three weeks before the U.S. reported its first death in late February.
Health officials said the death was missed because of a scarcity of testing and limited guidance on who should be tested, according to The Associated Press.
»MORE: New virus timeline reveals California had nation's first deaths weeks earlier
Other researchers have had mixed reactions whether Northeastern’s report is accurate despite a lack of testing.
“Even with these corrections, it’s still on the high side — this is higher than I would have expected,” said Dr. Donald Burke, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers of the University of Texas said her own projections match up, also estimating a high number of undetected early cases.
“By the time you see a few cases, it’s pretty certain that you already have an outbreak underway,” Meyers said.
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