“American medics officially registered their first Covid-19 patient on January 19, 2020, but the findings in a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggest the virus may have been circulating in the US prior to that.”
“The researchers studied almost 7,400 blood donations made in nine US states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. Evidence of Covid-19 bodies antibodies, the presence of which suggest a person had contact with the virus, were present in 106 of those samples, according to the study.”
“This means coronavirus could have been in the US a month before it saw its first confirmed case, and weeks before the Chinese authorities announced the infection in the city of Wuhan.”
It came from Southeast Asia. Bat diversity, amount etc are higher there
they also have virtually zero deaths. The entire country of Vietnam (100M people) has 35 covid deaths
It was at first harmless, then mutated once in China (and possibly other areas) into a more serious form, then mutated again into the deadly European version which didn't affect China because everyone had already gotten the prior forms by then.
IMO it's also a population density thing, if westerners lived at Asian density levels the prior forms would have spread completely without giving a chance for the deadlier forms to take root