Five years ago Monday, someone was identified with COVID-19 for the first time on American soil.
In the years since, 1.2 million Americans have died from the virus, and more than 7 million worldwide.
On Jan. 20, 2020, laboratory tests confirmed that man in his 30s who had recently returned from Wuhan, China, was infected with the novel coronavirus, which hadn’t yet been named.
The chaos and fear that would unfold couldn’t be foreseen at the time, but they would mark the start of a period marked by uncertainty and public health transformation.
Where was the first confirmed COVID case in the U.S.?
The first laboratory-confirmed case of novel coronavirus in the United States was diagnosed in Snohomish County, Washington, about 12 miles north of Seattle, less than two months after the first case was publicly reported in central China.
The Washington patient has still yet to be identified, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did say at the time that he was a 35-year-old man who had returned from a family trip to Wuhan, a city of nearly 14 million people, where the virus was first discovered. That same day, the CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center in response to the outbreak.
He was treated at the Providence Regional Medical Center just outside Seattle in Everett, Washington. USA TODAY reported that the patient experienced symptoms of cough, fever, fatigue and diarrhea before developing pneumonia. He was released from hospital care on Feb. 3, 2020.
Although his was the first confirmed case in the U.S., the virus probably was already spreading undetected here.