In March 13, 2020, the country was left in shock after the Health CS Mutahi Kagwe announced that the first cases of Covid 19 had been recorded in the country.
After Kagwe’s announcement, the first people to be confirmed with the diseases were revealed to be Brenda Cherutich and Brian Orinda who later attended a video conference with president Uhuru Kenyatta.
However, it has now been revealed that the two might not be the first people to have contracted the disease in the country.
According to a research titled ‘SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Prevalence in People with and without HIV in Rural Western Kenya, January to March 2020’, the first cases of the disease could have been from Kisumu and Kericho following an antibody testing on stored blood.
A 69-year-old man, a 46-year-old man, and a 47-year-old woman who showed no symptoms of the virus submitted their blood samples in January 2020.
“If participants in our study did have an asymptomatic infection, then such cases could have contributed to early undetected spread of the pandemic in Kenya,” researchers who tested the blood said.
The three people came from a region where Chinese nationals were constructing a road in 2019.
“Some of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 in Africa were imported by manufacturing workers who travelled from China to Egypt and it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 could have reached the otherwise remote region of our study similarly via construction workers,” they said.
A total of 582 blood samples were tested from Kisumu and Kericho between January and March last year.
The research revealed that 19 people had SARS-Cov-2 antibodies, with the three adults being the earliest in January.
It can however be difficult to distinguish antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV-2 from antibodies that fight other coronaviruses, including some that cause the common cold.
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