“Coronavirus hit Florida earlier than we thought – on a door handle at UF”

Published Feb. 11

Around this time last year, a group of researchers at the University of Florida began their annual search for flu samples.

For 19 days, professor John Lednicky and his laboratory took swab samples from a door handle at a busy campus building, and on four of those days they found a strain of influenza. But one day’s samples — from Feb. 21, 2020 — yielded something more notable: The researchers found the same strain of COVID-19 that had been circulating in Washington state at that time.

Read the rest of the story from the Tampa Bay Times here.

John Lednicky
Department: Department of Environmental and Global Health

John Lednicky

Research Professor
Phone: (352) 273-9204

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