Science
Related: About this forumHealth officials quietly moved the date of the 1st US COVID-19 death to January 2020
By Rachael Rettner 4 days ago
A Kansas woman's death certificate was recently amended to say she died from the disease on Jan. 9 2020.
A woman's death in Leavenworth, Kansas on Jan. 9, 2020 is now considered the first recorded death from COVID-19 in the U.S. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
The first recorded death from COVID-19 in the U.S. occurred a month earlier than previously thought: A Kansas woman's death certificate was recently amended to say she died from the disease in January 2020, according to news reports.
The 78-year-old woman, Lovell "Cookie" Brown, died on Jan. 9, 2020 in Leavenworth, Kansas, several weeks before the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in the U.S., according to The Mercury News. Initially, Brown's death certificate said she died of a stroke and chronic obstructive lung disease. But in May 2021, her doctors quietly updated the certificate to add "COVID-19 pneumonia" as a cause of death, The Mercury News reported.
That makes Brown the first documented COVID-19 death in the United States. Until recently, the first known COVID-19 death in the U.S. was thought to have occurred on Feb. 6, 2020, in a woman living in San Jose, California, Live Science previously reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official page for COVID-19 death counts now lists five COVID-19 deaths that occurred in January 2020. Brown's was identified as the first, according to The Mercury News. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) also lists a single COVID-19 death in the state on Jan. 9, 2020, two months earlier than the next reported COVID-19 death in the state, according to local news outlet WIBW.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/first-us-covid-19-death-january-2020.html?utm_source=notification
Random Boomer
(4,159 posts)There are undoubtedly others that just haven't been uncovered yet. And her death in the middle of Kansas, without any overseas travel, points to how absolutely useless the initial screening test questions were for catching potential covid carriers. If community spread was already present in early January in KANSAS, we never had a ghost of a chance of containing this virus.
niyad
(112,426 posts)Pneumonia-like condition, like nothing she had ever experienced before (and she had had pneumonia twice). Doctor could not diagnose it, and she was ill for weeks. Lives in a small town, no outside travel. Anecdotal, of course, but fits in with what we are learning, like in Italy.
NH Ethylene
(30,793 posts)We had a very unusual December 2019 at my high school in which many students were VERY sick with the flu. Many were out for over a week, would return and the next day be back out for another week - or more! It was not like any flu season I could remember.
Around the same time I had a strange occurrence in which I was not able to smell a fish odor in the teachers' room that all the other teachers were complaining about, for two days in a row (we had one fish-loving teacher who sometimes brought it to eat for lunch). I've never had that happen before.