In Kirkland, a Seattle suburb, a 59-year-old man with no travel or other known contact with the epidemic died Friday. He tested positive for the virus, and was the first American to die of the disease.
A nearby fire department station has also been declared off-limits because of exposure to ill seniors at that nursing home. Two dozen firefighters and have been quarantined, along with two police.
Three days earlier, on Wednesday, we were told a woman from Vacaville, California, an hour northeast of San Francisco, had tested positive for the virus.
She had been hospitalized for ten days, first at a smaller hospital, before being taken to the U.C. Davis medical center in Sacramento. She'd had no travel outside the U.S. or contact with anyone who might have been exposed to Coronavirus so she wasn't tested until U.C. Davis doctors insisted the Federal Government's Centers for Disease Control bend its rules and test her because, although she had no known link to the epidemic, her doctors had ruled out all other causes for her illness.
After that first case, the CDC made more exceptions. So on Friday, another California woman with no know source of contagion became a confirmed COVID-19 patient, this one being treated at the Mountain View El Camino hospital. If you saw the news stories, notice how none of them mention Silicon Valley, though the hospital is a 10-minute drive from Apple headquarters.
Friday night, another unknown source case was confirmed out of Oregon, in Lake Oswego. The person had fallen ill February 19. After seeing it in the news, I had to Google it to find out it was just 8 miles south of the center of Portland. The patient is an elementary school employee. The school is now closed until Wednesday.
It was only on Saturday, after the emergency cover-your-ass press conference Trump called on hearing of the first dead American, that we learned of the CDC's hyper-restrictive tests policy.
The announcement was that the CDC had relaxed its rule of only testing people with travel to international virus hot spots or had other direct links to the epidemic. Now people hospitalized with a respiratory syndrome that aren't positive for a flu virus or bacteria can be tested, too. And local labs, not just the CDC in Atlanta, will be able to test for the disease.
From this information we must assume there are now active outbreaks in the Seattle, Portland, Silicon Valley and Vacaville areas, and early in the week we will hear of dozens more cases there, as the work of tracing contacts and placing them under quarantine really gets underway.
But almost certainly there are other outbreaks --perhaps many more-- that will come to light now that the CDC has abandoned its head-in-the-sand no tests for 99.9% of Americans policy.
Especially in major transportation hubs, like Atlanta, where I live. If the virus is already widespread in the wild, how could it not be in the city with the world's busiest airport?
A number of cases wouldn't already have drawn attention because we're in the middle of a very active flu season: in the big majority of cases there is no difference a patient or doctor can see between influenza and COVID-19 without laboratory tests.
The WHO international expert mission to China report published on Friday, Feb. 28, emphasizes that most transmission in China has been within families. Many Chinese live in multi-generation traditional families that are rare in the United States.
The report notes that in the relatively few infections detected among minors (2.4% of the total) the children were tested because others in the household were sick. A Chinese CDC study of 44,000 confirmed cases said there were no deaths among children under the age of 10.
That's the good news. The bad news is that COVID-19 has it out for seniors. The majority of the deaths in the Chinese epidemic have been of people 60 or over.
The death rate among those over 80 that have been infected is 15%. For those reported as "retirees," it is 9%. Your chances of dying also are higher if you are male, have had cancer, have high blood pressure or have heart disease.
What they don't say is what are your chances if you are close to 70, retired, and a cancer survivor that's been diagnosed both with high blood pressure and heart disease, all put together.
And on top of that if you have the bad luck to live in a country run by a narcissistic jackass who insists on saying Coronavirus is a hoax to make him look bad and gives happy-talk press conferences highlighting how very few cases we've had but forgets to tell you we have so few because his CDC had been refusing to look for them.
So, yeah, they way things have been going, call me Likely Coronavirus Fatality.
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