According to a hospital in France, COVID-19 was in the country as far back as November 16, 2019. This discovery came to light after the medical imaging department did a retrospective study looking at 2,500 chest scans from November 1 to April 30 after the WHO requested countries to look into pneumonia-like cases from last year.
A WHO expert in animal diseases, Peter Ben Embarek, claims the virus originated in animals (maybe bats), and somehow spreading to humans. Other researchers have looked into whatever is being identified as COVID-19 and state that it likely originated from a lab. A Koch's postulate verification on the virus has yet to be published to positively identify the virus with the associated symptoms people are having.
The WHO continued to state the importance of identifying the animal COVID-19 allegedly came from. Another researching has previously said the virus infects humans much more easily than any other animals tested (including bats) except for pangolins (an animal of Africa).
In a press release in May, Michel Schmitt, chief doctor of the medical imaging department at Albert Schweitzer Hospital, said "the first case was noted in our centre on November 16".
"[There was a] very slow progression of the pathology’s negative impact until the end of February, then a rapid increase in its impact, peaking on March 31."
Hold on. We are told this deadly virus (now known to not be so deadly to most people under 70), is so dangerous because it spreads to quickly. Yet, it was present in November and took up to 4 months before it's presence even became known.
The explanations is apparently:
the virus dispersed sporadically after the first case in mid-November, before accelerating during year-end events such as Christmas markets and family celebrations until the epidemic went full-blown after a religious gathering in the city of Mulhouse, about 40km (25 miles) south of Colmar, in the last week of February.
A religious gathering in February is what propelled the explosion of the contagion? Sure, that makes sense (not really). After i've compared COVID-19 the to flu in Marh and April, some rebuttals were that even if it was like the flu, it's more dangerous because of how contagious it is. Well, it doesn't seem to have been that contagious originally.
Previously published studies for the earliest cases in France were January 24, and then December 27, both with connections to travels to China. But now this case is November 16, while the first confirmed case in China was November 17. Curious.
A spike in the influenza-like season of 2019-2020 indicate COVID-19 may have been present as early as Noevmber in the US as well.
Many of those calls, doctor visits, and hospitalizations categorized as “flu-like-illness” may have been due to the novel coronavirus for which the UK did not know to be looking and was not able to test and, ergo, assumed that it was “just the flu”. Especially given the exaggerated degree of severity noted at the end.
Because many of COVID’s symptoms are so similar to the flu, a good place to look for indications of COVID’s early presence in the US is in the CDC Flu Surveillance data. If COVID were widely disseminated in November or December, it’s presence would have likely caused an increase in doctor visits shortly after it began its rapid spread.
Here is a graph of weekly physician-reported visits for Influenza-like-illness (ILI) reported to the CDC for 2019–2020 year-to-date and for the last two flu seasons.
If COVID-19 was in the West in November, this further demolishes the fear-hyped doomsday scenario from the Imperial Model. It based it's projections of the virus starting in January. If the virus was around for months earlier, with the cases being reported in January and February, it means the contagious threat by COVID-19 is much lower.