Moscow, The first COVID-19 related death in the United States may have occurred as early as in January 2020, several weeks before the country started logging virus-related fatalities in the original record, Mercury News reported. Officially, the death of Patricia Dowd on February 6, 2020 in California’s San Jose is considered the first COVID-19 related death in the US, despite the fact that it still remains unknown how and where she got infected. Prior to Patricia Dowd’s death, the officials believed the first death occurred on February 29 of that year. However, six death certificates from January 2020 recently discovered in six different states including California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, showed that the virus may have been circulating beyond the country’s coastal states that were considered the earliest hotspots for COVID-19. The evidence that those death certificates were altered post hoc to include COVID-19 as the cause of death was then confirmed in interviews with numerous officials from the country’s health care system, however due to concerns surrounding privacy, the names, exact locations and circumstances of these deaths were not disclosed to the public.
