The odds that all four of the C.D.C.’s new death cases - from Kansas, California, Alabama and Wisconsin - really did result from Covid-19 are slim, some scientists said. Spread out across four states, they have become part of a scattershot collection of clues about the virus’s early spread beyond China - some of them trustworthy, others less so - that have begun drawing more attention as scientists and intelligence officials try to unravel how the pandemic began.
Now, at least four possible Covid-19 deaths from January 2020 have survived Dr. But that blip on the radar screen of Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helped to kick off a quiet, yearlong campaign at the agency to check and recheck the country’s first suspected Covid-related deaths in the uncertain days of early 2020. The person who certified it had meant June 2020, not January. That death was ultimately not what it seemed. Late last year, the federal government’s chief statistician on death received word about a tantalizing discovery: Someone had died from Covid-19 in January 2020, a death certificate said, a revelation that would have sped up the timeline of the virus’s spread in the United States by several weeks.
