A new Defense Health Agency report shows that the coronavirus was circulating on domestic U.S. military installations by late February 2020 -- in some cases, weeks before the first positive cases were identified at those locations.
New testing of samples collected last year for flu surveillance show that a patient at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, had COVID-19 on Feb. 24, 2020, the same day as the first known case identified by the Defense Department -- a dependent widow in South Korea -- and the day before an Army soldier, also in Korea, was listed as the first service member to have contracted the illness.
The Wright-Patterson sampling preceded the first publicly identified case on the Dayton installation by nearly a month. The first official positive case occurred March 22, 2020.
Likewise, surveillance found that a patient at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia had COVID-19 on March 4, 2020, while the first case at the installation wasn't identified until nearly three weeks later, on March 21.
Read Next: Coast Guard, National Guard Bureau Prepping for Mandatory COVID Vaccines
And, according to the study, a patient at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, had COVID-19 on March 20, 2020, but the first positive case wasn't identified until May 6, 2020.
The first identified case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was a Snohomish County, Washington, man who tested positive Jan. 21, 2020, after traveling from Wuhan, China.
The first case of "community spread" -- not tied directly to travel or to contact with a person known to have the virus -- was identified Feb. 26 in a Vacaville, California, woman.
Vacaville is located near Travis Air Force Base, where evacuees from Wuhan were temporarily housed from Feb. 5 through Feb. 21, 2020.
The coronavirus was circulating in the U.S. before that first identified case of community spread, however. A review in April 2020 by the Santa Clara, California, Public Health Department confirmed that a resident died Feb. 6, 2020, of the virus.
The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Department conducted the retrospective study to help establish a timeline for when the virus began circulating in the U.S. military population. Of 7,000 samples tested, just 24 contained genetic code, or RNA, for the coronavirus.
In addition to the cases at Wright-Patterson and Warner Robins, the study identified:
- A case at Lakenheath Air Base, United Kingdom, on March 12, while the first official case was March 20, 2020
- A case at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, on March 13; the first official case was March 22, 2020
- And a case at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, where the first official case occurred March 31, 2020
The study found no positive samples in the military community before Jan. 21, 2020, when the first case was identified in the U.S. -- results that appear to debunk a lingering conspiracy theory that the virus was brought to Wuhan by U.S. military personnel attending the Military World Games in October 2019.
Seeking to deflect criticism of his government's handling of a local outbreak in Wuhan, a Chinese government official in mid-March 2020 tweeted that it "might be the U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."
In the report, defense health experts noted that the data was limited, as samplings were sporadic from services other than the Air Force and were unavailable entirely for U.S. Southern Command. Just 10 samples were submitted for U.S. Central Command, leaving the early impact "of the epidemic in military members stationed in those regions as unknown."
The authors also said that to better prepare for the next pandemic, "a more detailed and thorough understanding of the early emergence of this pandemic in the U.S. and DoD-associated populations is required."
More than 326,000 Defense Department beneficiaries, including military members and their families, civilian employees and contractors, have tested positive for the coronavirus since the beginning of the outbreak.
Nearly 400 have died, including 29 service members.
-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.
