The coronavirus started spreading in Britain before health chiefs managed to find the first two patients in York in January, a study has claimed. They said that community transmission was likely to have begun at least 20 days before deaths started to rise exponentially. For some of them, the virus had been spreading for weeks before anyone tested positive and more than a month before people started to die, the study suggested. Belgium managed to pick up the first case of the coronavirus on the same day that public transmission is thought to have started, on February 2. Almost 180,000 people have since tested positive for the coronavirus and at least 12,400 people have died.

Source: Daily Mail May 13, 2020 10:25 UTC