KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In January 2020, people weren't nearly as familiar with COVID-19 as they are now, more than a year and a half into the pandemic.
But the deadly coronavirus was already present in the wider Kansas City-area as early as January 2020.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported a person in Leavenworth County died from COVID-19 on Jan. 9, 2020. It's the earliest COVID-19-related death on record in the U.S.
A KDHE spokesperson said local officials made the call to reclassify the death as a COVID-19 fatality because the person's symptoms were similar to those other COVID-19 patients experienced prior to death.
Dr. Rex Archer, former director of the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department, said there are lessons to be learned from this early death.
"When a new infectious disease breaks out, there will be deaths before we realize it's in our community, some place. That's why we have to have to act very quickly and strongly to put it out," Archer said.
Archer is now a professor and director of population and public health at Kansas City University. He explained how proper funding for public health could catch a disease in the early stages.
"For the last 30 years we have been underfunding our public health systems' ability to catch disease early. This again shows that we were not where we should have been back then. We still aren't where we need to be," Archer said.
Anthony Fehr, assistant professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Kansas, said the January 2020 death doesn't change how we view coronavirus currently, but it does raise important questions.
"It would be interesting if you go back to the sequence of the virus that infected these people, are they same virus that was originally reported in early January 2020 in China?"
Another question being raised: Are COVID-19 deaths underreported?
"COVID-19 was probably in the United States before December, and it probably did take lives. I think overall, the COVID-19 deaths are underreported," said Dr. Steven Stites, chief medical officer of the University of Kansas Health System.
Stites compared COVID-19 to another devastating virus from the past.
"There were a lot of HIV deaths that didn't get covered. We didn't diagnose it or didn't have all the testing available for it, and so now HIV deaths are probably a lot higher and probably out a lot longer than we knew, and I suspect the same is true for COVID-19," Stites said.
—
