[nudephil (OP)]

Mark sent us this:

Many people I know had the symptoms in December, and PHE flu statistics show a unknown substrain from week 40 last year up to week 4. Is it possible that COVID-19 has been around earlier than January

How would you prove/disprove this?

[Bobolink]

The first case of covid 19 was in November.  The virus is called covid 19, because it was discovered in 2019.

[set fair]

Almost certain it was in the UK in december. For evidence there is the genome mutation data.