When did the coronavirus first appear and begin spreading? Did it emerge in December in the Huanan wet market, or did it leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November, or was it intentionally released at the World Military Games in October? Was it spreading internationally during autumn 2019? Has it been around for years?
Here I’ll present evidence that the coronavirus appeared at some point in the second half of 2019 and was spreading globally during that autumn and winter.
There have been a number of studies that have gone back and tested stored samples for evidence of the coronavirus, either antibodies or viral RNA. One of the most intriguing is a study from Lombardy, northern Italy, by measles researchers who had spotted that Covid could cause a measles-like syndrome. They tested hundreds of stored samples taken during 2018-20 for both antibodies and viral RNA. They found 11 samples positive for viral RNA from August 2019 to February 2020, including one from September, five from October, one from November and two from December. Four of these were also positive for antibodies, including the earliest sample from September 12, 2019 (both IgG and IgM). Note that these samples were from ill people so estimates cannot be made from them of community prevalence. The positive samples were genetically sequenced to reveal mutation information, reducing the chances of them being false positives. None of the 100 samples from August 2018 to July 2019 showed strong evidence of infection, further validating the methods used and suggesting to the researchers that the virus emerged around July 2019.
A separate study in northern Italy tested wastewater from 2019 for viral RNA and found samples in Milan and Turin positive from December 18th, though negative prior to that, which is in contrast to the results of the first study. The samples were again genetically sequenced, adding to their reliability.
A Brazilian sewage study found SARS-CoV-2 RNA in samples from late November and December 2019, but not in two earlier samples from October and early November. The samples were taken from one site in the southern Brazilian city of Florianópolis and were genetically sequenced for confirmation.
An antibody study of archived Red Cross blood conducted by the US CDC found 39 antibody-positive serum samples collected December 13-16, 2019 in California, Washington and Oregon. Overall, 2 percent of blood samples collected from these states on these dates tested positive for antibodies. The full results can be viewed in the table below. A 2 percent antibody prevalence in mid-December suggests significant community spread across America during November 2019. However, there were no earlier samples for comparison and no testing or sequencing of viral RNA for confirmation.
A study of stored blood samples in France examined hundreds of routinely collected samples in a population cohort and found around 2 percent prevalence of antibodies in November, rising prevalence in December and around 5 percent prevalence in January. These figures do seem on the high side when compared to the above studies, and the lack of testing and sequencing of viral RNA and the absence of samples from earlier periods suggest this may be less reliable evidence.
Another Italian study tested blood samples from lung cancer screening for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and found 14 percent of those from September 2019 were positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. But again, this lacked testing and sequencing of viral RNA and negative controls from earlier periods. A Spanish study detected SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA in a sample of wastewater from Barcelona on March 12, 2019; however, all the other historic samples up to January 2020 were negative and it is suspected that this is a false positive due to contamination or cross-reaction (the sample wasn’t sequenced).
What about early spread in China? It’s hard to get reliable data for this country. However, a leaked Chinese Government report found hospital patients (recognised retrospectively) admitted in Wuhan from November 17, 2019, suggesting the virus was spreading there during November and probably October.
A molecular clock study estimating the date at which the common ancestor of early viral samples was around put the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 as early as July, in China. A separate molecular clock study estimated the emergence between mid-October and mid-November in Hubei province, China.
So the evidence is clear that the virus was circulating both in China and internationally by November 2019 at the latest. We can also say with strong confidence that it was not circulating prior to July 2019, and it may not have been around before October 2019, depending on how reliable the European data from the early autumn are.
Some argue that all this evidence of early spread – despite coming from multiple sources and using robust validation methods such as sequencing – must be faulty in some way, as the lack of excess deaths prior to March 2020 makes it impossible for the virus to have been spreading widely over the autumn and winter.
My view is that this argument is insufficient to overcome the clear evidence of early spread. I don’t deny that there is something of a ‘mystery‘ that must be resolved, in that the wave of excess deaths did not begin until March 2020. Some sceptics resolve this ‘mystery’ by arguing that the virus must therefore be no more deadly than other similar viruses, and thus that any excess deaths since March 2020 must all have been caused by interventions such as lockdowns, faulty treatment protocols and vaccines. However, I agree with Dr. Pierre Kory that we have undeniable evidence of waves of severe pneumonia with a common clinical profile that began in March 2020 and that are best explained by the novel respiratory virus to which most of the deceased tested positive. While some of the excess deaths will be due to interventions, and some of the Covid deaths will be misclassified, the majority of additional deaths from a respiratory cause will be due to the virus. Professor John Ioannidis used antibody data to estimate that the infection fatality rate in the Americas and Europe in the first wave was around 0.3-0.4 percent (higher in hot spots), which is several-fold higher than flu, usually estimated at around 0.1 percent.
A good counterexample to the claim that all the excess deaths in the pandemic were caused by interventions and not the virus is South Dakota, which never imposed any interventions. Despite this laissez-faire approach it had a mild spring wave; yet then had a massive summer wave that resulted in greatly elevated deaths during the autumn. These deaths certainly can’t be put down to sudden panic: the state was so relaxed during its summer outbreak that it held a massive motorcycle rally.
So how to explain the lack of excess deaths during the autumn and winter of 2019-20? The most important point to be made is that while SARS-CoV-2 was clearly circulating during that winter, it does not appear to have been the dominant virus either in the community or in care homes and hospitals. Thus while, say, 2 percent of the population may have contracted the virus during the winter, because it was competing with other, milder viruses and wasn’t running rampant among the high-risk population, its impact was limited and it did not cause noticeable excess deaths.
The early-spread-sceptic’s objection to this point is that the virus is clearly highly infectious so if it was present and circulating it’s simply not possible for it to have remained at a low level and not run rampant in, say, care homes, causing havoc.
But is it really true that the virus always causes a large wave of infections and deaths whenever it is present, and as soon as it arrives? The evidence suggests not. Just look at how it failed to take off in many places in spring 2020, not just South Dakota as described above, but Japan, South Korea, Germany, Eastern Europe and large parts of the US. India notably wasn’t hit hard till Delta in 2021, and East Asia not until Omicron. In other words, the virus doesn’t always do what we’d expect, and in particular it doesn’t always have a deadly wave as soon as it is present.
To illustrate, here’s the picture in the US at the end of May 2020, after the initial wave. It’s a real patchwork, with clear concentrations of excess deaths around New York and around Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, plus Louisiana and one or two other states. Many other states had very few excess deaths during the spring. Yet we know the virus was circulating widely in every state.
Then, by the following winter, excess deaths were high almost everywhere, meaning specific local treatment protocols or policy responses cannot be credited either with causing the deaths or averting them.
In Europe, too, there was huge variation in the impact during the initial spring wave, even though the virus was circulating everywhere.
This wasn’t owing to policy responses, as shown by the very different outcomes the following winter.
In line with these inconsistent outcomes, numerous studies have shown that outcomes during the first wave weren’t explained by policy responses. But they also aren’t explained by whether or not the virus was circulating, as it was circulating everywhere.
The evidence is clear then, from multiple studies with robust validation methods including genetic sequencing of viral RNA, that the virus was circulating globally since November 2019 at the latest, with some evidence of its presence as far back as July, though not earlier than that.
The most likely reason that there was not an explosive, deadly outbreak prior to March 2020 (or even later in many places) is that the virus was still in competition with other winter viruses so was not dominant or running rampant in hospitals and care homes. The large outbreaks from spring onwards may have been assisted by the emergence of new, more infectious (and possibly more deadly) variants. A winter Covid prevalence of around 2 percent largely among the low risk could easily go unnoticed among the usual winter diseases without triggering noticeable surges in hospital admissions and deaths.
On this evidence it seems we can definitively rule out both an emergence before July 2019 (too many negatives and just one questionable positive) and after November 2019 (too many positives in a number of countries). The evidence is not currently consistent or robust enough to be able to pin it down more definitively than that.
There should, of course, be much more evidence on early spread. The World Health Organisation in June 2020 called for early spread to be properly investigated. However, very little has been done, and particularly in the United States, the various Government agencies have made no efforts to investigate early spread as part of their general neglect and squashing of all investigations into Covid origins.
Such silence and obfuscation only raises suspicions. And there is no shortage of reasons to be suspicious. The lack of genetic diversity in early samples, the high degree of adaption to humans from the outset, the absence of animal reservoirs and the presence of unique features that make the virus highly infectious among humans suggest that it was not natural but engineered, and thus either leaked from a lab or was released. Who was involved in the research that created the virus and the course of events that led to its getting into the human population is therefore a question of great importance that must continue to be pursued.
Article cross-posted from the Daily Sceptic via Brownstone Institute.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.