Thursday, 07 May 2020 / Published in Latest News

Mayor Michael Melham affected by coronavirus way before the first reported case

China on Thursday seized on comments made by a New Jersey mayor that he had contracted the novel coronavirus as early as November — a claim that, if true, would throw the U.S. and Beijing’s timelines about COVID-19 into disarray.

Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry who has been at the center of pushing back against the U.S., quoted a Chinese spokeswoman in a tweet, saying: “More reports on previously undiscovered COVID-19 cases are emerging. New Jersey mayor was infected in November; 171 cases in Florida by January & NONE had been to China. What else hasn’t been revealed in the U.S.?”

Belleville Mayor Michael Melham told a source on Thursday that he became symptomatic after he returned in November from a conference in Atlantic City, two months before the first confirmed U.S. case was recorded in Washington state. He said multiple people from the conference have contacted him and said they, too, were experiencing extreme flu-like symptoms. At the time, there were no tests for COVID-19 but Melham said whatever he had hit him hard and made him feel “like a heroin addict going through withdrawals.”

“I didn’t know what was happening to me,” he said. “I never felt that I could be so sick.”

He said he recently asked his doctor to test his blood for COVID-19 antibodies and that the test had come back positive.

“We all hear about how COVID-19 didn’t really exist here in the U.S. until January,” Melham said. “That is obviously not the case. I am living, breathing proof that we were all dealing with it months earlier.”

Melham knows his health claims play into the hands of Beijing, which has launched an aggressive public relations campaign to pin the spread of the coronavirus on the United States.

The U.S., in turn, has accused China of failing to act quickly to contain the virus, claiming the country silenced doctors and whistleblowers during the early days of its spread, leading to the global pandemic that has infected 3.7 million people and killed more than 264,000 worldwide.

Source- foxnews.com