Belleville Mayor Michael Mel­ham said he has tested pos­i­tive for coro­n­avirus an­ti­bod­ies, adding that he be­lieves he was sick with the virus in No­vem­ber — more than a month be­fore doc­tors in China first re­ported cases of the new dis­ease.

Mel­ham said he was sick to­ward the end of No­vem­ber and suf­fered from chills, hal­lu­ci­na­tions and a “sky­rock­et­ing tem­per­a­ture” af­ter he left the League of Mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties Con­fer­ence in At­lantic City.

“It felt as if I was an ad­dict go­ing through with­drawal,” Mel­ham said in a press re­lease. “I did­n’t know what was hap­pen­ing to me. I never felt that I could be so sick.”

The first known case of the coro­n­avirus in the United States was in Jan­u­ary and in­volved a West Coast man who had been in Chi­na’s Wuhan Province. Health ex­perts now say the coro­n­avirus may have been qui­etly cir­cu­lat­ing in the United States in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary, when test­ing was rare. None have pushed the time­line back as far as No­vem­ber, how­ever.