COVID-19 "Spreading stealthily through Pacific Northwest" for up to six weeks
STAT is an exemplary source according to science journalist Laurie Garrett, though they bury the lede here:
This weekend, as it became clearer and clearer that Covid-19 has been spreading stealthily through the Pacific Northwest, the task facing health officials has become more and more monumental. To try to stop the virus’ transmission and restrain the outbreak, they need to identify every single person with whom patients have come into contact, isolate those at risk of harboring the illness, and monitor the entire network of people for symptoms....
On Friday night, there were reports of four people — two in California, one in Oregon, and one in Washington State — who’d tested positive for the virus but had neither a known history of traveling outside the U.S. nor any identified contact with previously diagnosed patients. By Saturday afternoon, officials reported an outbreak of the virus in a long-term care facility outside of Seattle as well as the first death in the U.S. due to the illness — but it wasn’t clear whether those two events were related.
“That’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to answer now,” said Jeffrey Duchin, health officer for public health for Seattle and King County in a Saturday press briefing. “We’re doing an investigation as we speak to try and understand all the potential exposures that that patient may have had and if there’s any potential commonalities … but at this point we don’t have links.”
By Saturday night virologists had sequenced samples from one of the mysteriously acquired Covid-19 cases in Washington State, and found that the pathogen looked like a descendent of the virus swabbed from the first reported case in the U.S., identified way back on January 16. But there was no known contact between the two patients.
“There are some enormous implications here,” tweeted Trevor Bedford, a researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who studies how viruses evolve and spread. “This strongly suggests there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks.”
(Emphasis added.)
My suspicion is that Seattle is not the only region within the US that the virus is spreading, and that the US are well behind the curve in addressing an ongoing outbreak.
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