Nottingham woman, 75, is the earliest known Covid-19 patient to catch the disease in the UK after testing positive on February 21 – a week before officials accepted the virus was spreading in Britain
- The woman is thought to be the first to catch Covid-19 in the community
- UK’s first cases were confirmed on January 31 in a mother and son from China
- Woman in Nottingham may have caught it as early as February 9, study says
A 75-year-old woman in Nottingham was the first known case of Covid-19 spreading in the UK because she gave a positive sample on February 21, scientists claim.
The woman, who later became one of the first three people to die of the disease, fell ill more than two weeks before officials admitted the virus was spreading in Britain.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said on March 5, when the first death was announced, that it was ‘highly likely’ that community transmission was happening inside the UK.
But a report now says there is evidence that it had been going on for more than a week already.
The Nottingham woman had been given a routine swab for another health problem on February 21, and researchers have since tested that and found out she was positive for Covid-19 at the time.
It had previously been thought that a man in Haslemere, Surrey – the 20th case diagnosed in the UK, on February 28 – was the first person to catch it on home soil.
Scientists say a policy of only testing people who had been to high-risk areas abroad meant thousands of coronavirus cases went undetected early this year.
Deaths could have been prevented and lockdown could have come sooner and softened the blow of the pandemic if the international travel rule hadn’t been used, they said.
The woman later died and is understood to have been the first fatality recorded by University Hospitals Nottingham NHS Trust, on March 3. (Pictured: City Hospital which is run by the trust)
The researchers, led by Professor Jonathan Ball at the University of Nottingham, said: ‘Patient 1 in this study is, to the best of our knowledge, the earliest described community-acquired case of SARS-CoV-2 in the UK, admitted to hospital care on the 21st of February 2020’.
The scientists say the woman had given a nasal swab sample for another health problem on February 21.
It is not known when doctors confirmed that she had Covid-19 – or whether she ever knew she had it – but scientists have since retested the woman’s nasal swab and found that she had Covid-19 when she gave the sample on February 21.
She later died and is understood to have been the first fatality recorded by University Hospitals Nottingham NHS Trust, on March 3.
That death on March 3 was one of the first three recorded in England.
Professor Ball and colleagues say they can be sure the woman caught the coronavirus in the UK because she had not travelled abroad in a reasonable time frame before giving the swab.
Their paper said: ‘No recent travel history or contact with a recently returned traveller was identified during care such that the PHE-defined case definition for SARS-CoV-2 testing at the time was not met.’
The paper claimed that the woman was also the first person to die of Covid-19 in the UK, but NHS England has a record of a patient dying in Essex a day earlier.
It is unlikely that the Nottingham woman is truly the first person to have caught the coronavirus on British soil, she may just be the first for whom there is a record.
The first cases were confirmed on January 31 in a Chinese mother and son who were staying at a hotel in York.