Coronavirus
circulated in U.S. weeks earlier than thought, mistaken
for flu, health official says
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[April 23, 2020]
By Sharon Bernstein and Kanishka Singh
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - The novel
coronavirus circulated in January in California, weeks earlier than
thought, and early deaths were likely mistaken for the flu, a county
health official said on Wednesday.
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A 57-year-old woman had died of COVID-19 on Feb. 6, far earlier than
any other reported cases in the United States, said Sara Cody, the
health officer in Santa Clara County, California.
It was previously thought that the first U.S. death from COVID-19,
the respiratory disease caused by the virus, was in Washington state
on Feb. 29.
News of the deaths in California could improve public health
officials' understanding of how the outbreak took hold in the United
States.
Additional early deaths may also be discovered in California,
further changing public health officials' understanding of the
virus' progress. On Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he
had asked medical examiners from all 58 counties in California to
research deaths that might have been COVID-related back to December.
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The California woman's death and two other early cases - a
69-year-old man who died Feb. 17 and a 70-year-old man who died
March 6 - were confirmed to have been COVID-19 by the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention after it tested tissue samples.
The county had previously identified its first case of community
transmission - infectious spread among people who had not been to
China or other early hot spots - on Feb. 28, Cody said. But none of
the three patients who died had traveled.
“What these deaths tell us is that we had community transmission
probably to a significant degree, far earlier than we had known, and
that indicates that the virus was probably introduced and
circulating in our community far earlier than we had known,” Cody
said.
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Because the region was undergoing a bad flu season at the time, many cases may
have been misclassified as influenza, she said.
The cases were likely "iceberg tips," Cody said, indicating that many more
people were also infected.
The three cases were discovered because the county medical examiner's office was
not satisfied that it had found the correct cause of death, Cody said. Because
coronavirus tests were not available, they saved tissue samples, which they sent
to the CDC.
The testing parameters at the time by the CDC restricted testing to individuals
with a known travel history and who sought medical care for specific symptoms.
U.S. coronavirus deaths topped 46,000 on Wednesday, doubling in a little over a
week and rising on Tuesday by a near-record amount in a single day, according to
a Reuters tally https://reut.rs/2WVPxuE.
The United States has by far the world's largest number of confirmed coronavirus
cases at more than 830,000.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California and Kanishka Singh in
Bengaluru; Editing by Alex Richardson and Lisa Shumaker)
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