Very disconcerting news...
[SIZE=6]The timeline of the virus’s arrival in the U.S. shifts with the revelation of an early death in California.[/SIZE]
California’s quest to retrace the early steps of the coronavirus entered a new phase Wednesday after officials linked the death of a 57-year-old woman in early February to the virus.
The woman’s case, weeks before any other known death, had piqued the interest of a local coroner in Santa Clara County. After further examination, local officials sent tissue samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing in mid-March, but the results, confirming a coronavirus diagnosis, did not come back until Tuesday.
Friends and family said the woman had developed symptoms on Feb. 2 and died four days later, on Feb. 6, while working from home. The woman worked at a Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturing company with offices worldwide, including in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began.
The case suggests that the virus was in California as early as January, even though officials, hampered by limited testing capacity, did not identify cases of community spread until late February.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said Wednesday that there could be “subsequent announcements” as investigations across California further examine the early origins of the virus. He said investigators were looking at coroner and autopsy reports going back to December in some counties.
Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the coronavirus.
The revelation that a coronavirus death took place in the United States in early February shifts the understanding of its arrival and changes the picture of what the nation was contending with by the time government officials began taking action.
The first Covid-19 death in the United States had previously been believed to be on Feb. 26 in Seattle, one of the worst-hit cities in the country.
Dr. Sara Cody, the chief health officer of Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, said the newly diagnosed cases underlined that the virus was spreading undetected for weeks in the country in January and February.
Dr. Cody led the effort to issue the nation’s first stay-at-home orders on March 16. But she said she would have issued the orders even earlier had she known about the February deaths.
“I think if we had had widespread testing earlier and if we had been able to document the level of transmission in the county, if we had understood then that people were already dying, we probably would have acted earlier than we did,” Dr. Cody said.
