Testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies doesn’t indicate when a person was infected.
Photo: Mary Altaffer/Associated PressSome New Yorkers had antibodies for the new coronavirus more than a week before the first official case in the state was announced on March 1, new research shows.
The findings, released Monday by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, signal that the virus may have been introduced in the New York City region earlier than previously thought, researchers said. The discovery is the latest effort by researchers and government agencies to pinpoint the introduction of the coronavirus in hard-hit New York.
The Mount Sinai researchers looked for antibodies of the virus in more than 500 random blood samples from patients at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital, collected beginning the week of Feb. 9.
Samples came from patients visiting the emergency department and from a separate group of patients who underwent regular screenings as part of obstetric care, regular office and treatment visits, and elective or planned surgeries, as well as other types of care.
Researchers said they found antibodies in some samples taken during the week ending Feb. 23. New York officials announced the first case of the virus—a Manhattan woman who works in health care and had recently traveled to Iran—on March 1.
Researchers said they found a significant increase in samples positive for antibodies in the emergency department group starting the week ending March 22 and in the screening group a week later.
Testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies doesn’t indicate when a person was infected. People who have had the virus that causes Covid-19 gain some immunity, scientists say, though it is currently unknown whether that protection lasts a few months, or longer.
By the week ending April 19, an estimated 1.62 million individuals in the city had been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19, Mount Sinai researchers said. The samples aren’t representative of the entire population, they said. New York state officials released a study in April that gave a similar estimate on the number of actual virus cases. The state study suggested more than one in five New York City residents may have been infected.
Nearly 19,000 people were hospitalized in New York with Covid-19 at the peak of the outbreak, in mid-April. The state’s confirmed death toll from the virus is nearly 25,000—the highest in the country.
State health officials recently conducted their own search for cases of the virus that predate March 1. They retested 856 nasopharyngeal swabs taken from patients with respiratory disease, taken between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 31, that were sent to the state’s laboratory as part of an influenza surveillance program.
That effort, completed earlier this month as the demands of regular testing eased, is part of a larger sampling led by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC routinely performs rapid sentinel surveillance, a common epidemiological effort to determine how many people are infected with a disease now and how many were infected in the past.
Of the 761 samples that were taken before March 1, none was positive for the virus.
A spokesman for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said the CDC requested from the agency 549 anonymous samples from six local hospitals. The samples were from people who tested negative for flu and other respiratory viruses from Feb. 29 to March 20. Of that group, 6.6% of the samples tested positive for Covid-19; no samples taken before Feb. 29 tested positive, the spokesman said.
Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a former deputy commissioner of New York City’s health department who now teaches at Cornell University, said he wasn’t surprised by the health departments’ results.
“It doesn’t seem that there was a huge amount of transmission in the country in January and February,” he said. “It shows how quickly the virus can spread in a completely susceptible population. It’s quite striking that we went from zero to 100 miles an hour.”
In April, the New York City Public Health Laboratory tested 116 specimens for the novel coronavirus that were initially collected for respiratory virus surveillance in January and February from the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. All 116 specimens collected from decedents were negative for the virus that causes Covid-19, according to a spokesman for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
The spokesman said the city hasn’t done further retroactive testing of archived flu swabs from before Feb. 29.
A spokesman for Northwell Health said the system hasn’t done much archival testing for earlier cases of coronavirus because the focus has been on keeping pace with diagnostic and antibody testing. At some point this summer, the spokesman said, the system plans on allocating testing capacity to do research on samples taken in January and February.
Researchers at NYU Langone Health have analyzed a small number of flu swabs from January and February that were collected at Bellevue Hospital, part of the city’s public Health + Hospitals system. Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at NYU Langone, said none of those samples have been positive for the coronavirus.
“We’ll try to get more swabs from closer to mid-February onwards. I bet we’ll find some there,” Dr. Heguy said.
Write to Melanie Grayce West at melanie.west@wsj.com and Jimmy Vielkind at Jimmy.Vielkind@wsj.com
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