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COVID-19 Coronavirus
COVID-19 Coronavirus
CNN: CDC director says some coronavirus-related deaths have been found posthumously
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New signs suggest coronavirus was in California far earlier than anyone knew
By PAIGE ST. JOHNSTAFF WRITER
APRIL 11, 20205 AM
Source:https://www.latimes.com/california/...rus-deaths-signs-of-earlier-spread-california
SACRAMENTO — A man found dead in his house in early March. A woman who fell sick in mid-February and later died.
These early COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials started looking for it. The lag time has had dire consequences, allowing the virus to spread unchecked before social distancing rules went into effect.
“The virus was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time,” Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of Santa Clara County government, told county leaders in a recent briefing.
How long? A study out of Stanford suggests a dramatic viral surge in February.
But Smith on Friday said data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments and others suggest it was “a lot longer than we first believed” — most likely since “back in December.”
“This wasn’t recognized because we were having a severe flu season,” Smith said in an interview. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice. You didn’t even go to the doctor. The doctor maybe didn’t even do it because they presumed it was the flu.”
Just as New York has strong ties to travelers from Europe, who are believed to have brought the coronavirus there from Italy, the Bay Area is a natural hub for those traveling to and from China. Santa Clara County had its first two cases of COVID-19 almost a week before federal approval of emergency testing for the disease Feb. 4. Both were in travelers returning from Wuhan, China, where the virus was rampant.
In January and most of February, there was little, if any, community testing in California.
The CDC provided testing materials to only some health departments, with restrictions that confined testing and thus the tracking of the novel coronavirus to those who were sick or exposed to someone already known to have COVID-19. The federal agency’s focus was on cruise ships, with Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess carrying the largest known cluster of COVID-19 cases outside of China. The first passenger tested positive for COVID-19 five days after the ship’s Jan. 20 departure from Japan. Eventually, 712 passengers and crew tested positive, and nine of them died.
COVID-19 did not reappear in the Bay Area until Feb. 27, when doctors finally decided to test a hospitalized woman who had been ill for weeks. She became the region’s first case of community-spread coronavirus.
But from there, almost every positive test pointed toward local spread. “When public health [officials] tried to track down the start of the disease … we weren’t able to find, specifically, a contact,” Smith told county supervisors. “That means the virus is in the community already — not, as was suspected by the CDC, as only in China and being spread from contact with China.”
Researchers still unsure how long the virus lurked are now turning to blood banks and other repositories to see if lingering antibodies can show them what was missed. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health is looking for virus antibodies in samples from blood banks in Los Angeles, San Francisco and four other cities across the country.
Santa Clara County’s first community-spread case also became its first announced COVID-19 death.
Azar Ahrabi, 68, died March 9, the second COVID-19 fatality in California, five days after the first. For the first few weeks, the urban county that sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, home to Stanford University and tech giants Apple and Google, led California in coronavirus deaths.
Health investigators said they could find no source of Ahrabi’s infection. Her family members said she stayed mostly at home, taking care of her mother. She seldom drove, and she walked to a local grocery store to shop. But she and her mother lived in a Santa Clara apartment complex in a neighborhood with a high density of international residents.
Relatives said she showed signs of illness in mid-February. For more than a week, they gave only a passing thought that her fever and sudden fatigue might be tied to the horrifying news out of China.
Ahrabi’s son, Amir, said that when his mother checked into a medical clinic Feb. 20 and was diagnosed with a nonspecific pneumonia, she was prescribed antibiotics and sent home. The next day, her doctor admitted her to the intensive care unit.
Amir said he asked that she be tested for COVID-19, and doctors told him the county health department would not approve the test. She met none of the qualifying criteria.
New studies out of Stanford University and the CDC, taken together, suggest that the novel coronavirus spread quickly through the Bay Area.
Stanford’s virology lab, looking retroactively at some 2,800 patient samples collected since January, did not find the first COVID-19 cases until late February — from two patients who were tested Feb. 21 and Feb. 23. Neither of those patients, the researchers note in a letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., would have met existing criteria for COVID-19 testing.
The California Department of Public Health and the CDC did not begin community surveillance for COVID-19 in Santa Clara County until March 5. Samples were collected from 226 coughing, feverish patients who visited four urgent care centers; 1 in 4 turned out to have the flu. The state tested samples from a subset of 79 non-flu patients. Nine of them had COVID-19.
The result suggested that 8% of people walking into the urgent care centers carried the novel coronavirus, an infection rate that mirrored the 5% infection rate at a Los Angeles medical center, the CDC said in a report published Friday.
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1 in 5 New Yorkers May Have Had Covid-19, Antibody Tests Suggest
Accurate antibody testing is a critical tool to determine if the pandemic has slowed enough to begin restarting the economy.
By J. David Goodman and Michael Rothfeld
April 23, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-antibodies-test-ny.html
One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday that suggested that the virus had spread far more widely than known.
If the pattern holds, the results from random testing of 3,000 people raised the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers — as many as 2.7 million, the governor said — who never knew they had been infected had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also said that such wide infection might mean that the death rate was far lower than believed.
While the reliability of some early antibody tests has been widely questioned, researchers in New York have worked in recent weeks to develop and validate their own antibody tests, with federal approval. State officials believe that accurate antibody testing is seen as a critical tool to help determine when and how to begin restarting the economy, and sending people back to work.
“The testing also can tell you the infection rate in the population — where it’s higher, where it’s lower — to inform you on a reopening strategy,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Then when you start reopening, you can watch that infection rate to see if it’s going up and if it’s going up, slow down.”
The testing in New York is among several efforts by public health officials around the country to determine how many people may have been already exposed to the virus, beyond those who have tested positive. The results appear to conform with research from Northeastern University that indicated that the coronavirus was circulating by early February in the New York area and other major cities.
In California, a pair of studies using antibody testing found rates of exposure as high as 4 percent in Santa Clara County and 5 percent in Los Angeles County — higher than those indicated by infection tests, though not nearly as high as found in New York.
Public health officials recently disclosed that a woman in Santa Clara who died on Feb. 6 was infected with the virus.
In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.
State researchers sampled blood from the approximately 3,000 people they had tested over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores. The results were sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany, a respected public health lab.
Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the state health commissioner, said the lab had set a high bar for determining positive results, that it had been given blanket approval to develop coronavirus tests by the Food and Drug Administration and that state officials discussed this particular antibody test with the agency.
He said that while concerns about some tests on the market were valid, the state’s test was reliable enough to determine immunity — and, possibly, send people back to the office.
“It is a way to say this person had the disease and they can go back into the work force,” Dr. Zucker said. “A strong test like we have can tell you that you have antibodies.”
But he cautioned that the length of any such immunity remained unknown. “The amount of time, we need to see. We don’t know that yet,” he said, adding, “They will last a while.”
Unlike so-called diagnostic tests, which determine whether someone is infected, often using nasal swabs, blood tests for Covid-19 antibodies are intended to reveal whether a person was previously exposed and has developed an immune response. Some tests also measure the amount of antibodies present.
Hours before Mr. Cuomo’s presentation, a top health official in New York City expressed general skepticism about the utility of antibody tests — especially those on the private market — when it comes to questions of immunity and critical decisions over social distancing and reopening the economy.
Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, the city’s top official for disease control, wrote in an email alert on Wednesday that such tests “may produce false negative or false positive results,” pointing to “significant voids” in using the science to pinpoint immunity.
The alert, sent to medical providers and other subscribers, went on to warn that the consequences of relying on potentially false results may lead to “providing patients incorrect guidance on preventive interventions like physical distancing or protective equipment.”
Dr. Daskalakis, early in the outbreak, had been a strong voice arguing for social distancing measures and urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools in New York City. When Mr. de Blasio resisted doing so, Dr. Daskalakis threatened to resign, a city official said. City Hall has said the mayor was never told of the threat.
Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the city health department, said the alert referred to “unvetted tests outside of a lab setting — which is not what the state is doing.”
He added that there “isn’t any daylight here” between the city and state.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, praised the overall intent of New York’s study, but said the results in this case probably skew to a higher estimate than is real because a survey of grocery store shoppers in a pandemic would not be representative.
The sampling may disproportionately include those who have either already had the illness, or those who naturally tend to go out more and so are more likely to be exposed to the virus, he said. It would miss children, teenagers and older adults who may be sheltering in place.
“It’s not a criticism. It’s more of a comment that we have to be careful about interpreting supermarket customers as a representative sample when the state was in lockdown,” he said.
State officials said the test had been calibrated to err on the side of producing false negatives — to miss some who may have antibodies — rather than false positives, which would suggest a person had coronavirus antibodies when they did not.
Health experts have worried that if tests return high rates of false positives, they could encourage people to abandon protective measures and risk worsening the virus’s spread. Others warn that the true value of coronavirus antibodies is still unknown.
The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, recommends that antibody testing be used only in research settings, and not to make medical decisions such as to permit an individual to return to work. States and the federal government are not bound by the organization’s advice.
“I’m very ambivalent about these tests, because we don’t really know yet through the science what it means to have an antibody,” said Dr. Joan Cangiarella, the vice-chair of clinical operations at NYU Langone Health’s pathology department.
“We are hoping these antibodies mean you will be immune for some time,” she said. “But I don’t think the data is fully out there to understand if that means that you’re actually immune. And if these antibodies start to decline, what’s that time frame? Does it decline in a year from now?”
Mr. Cuomo on Thursday did not talk about any potential for immunity among those previously infected.
But he did suggest, based on the survey, that if as many as 2.7 million New Yorkers had the virus, the death rate in New York from Covid-19 would most likely be far lower than previously believed, possibly 0.5 percent of those infected.
More than 15,000 people have died of the virus in the state, a figure that does not include an additional 5,000 people in New York City who were never tested but were presumed to have died from the disease.
The number of deaths has been increasing less quickly, and new hospital admissions for the coronavirus have remained relatively flat over the past three days: about 1,350 patients per day, down from over 2,000 per day last week. More than 263,000 have tested positive for infection.
Mr. Cuomo said antibody testing results, along with hospitalization numbers, would influence the state’s reopening strategy, noting that the number of people being hospitalized was still too high to consider easing restrictions.
The state’s plan would involve tracking infections as restrictions are loosened on gatherings and businesses. Antibody testing would be used, Mr. Cuomo said, for identifying coronavirus survivors who can donate convalescent plasma — the part of the blood that contains antibodies. Doctors at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and elsewhere have been testing this use of plasma for treating patients with the virus.
After the city’s alert appeared on Wednesday night, the Greater New York Hospital Association, a powerful group with close ties to the governor, sent its own message to its member hospitals, suggesting that the city’s warning was overblown and highlighting how it differed from the state Health Department’s approach.
Susan C. Waltman, the association’s general counsel, said the tests are valuable for the information they can provide about the virus, and contrasted the city’s “absolute, rather dismissive terms” with what she described as an approach from the state that “tries to put the test results in perspective.”
Last week, Ms. Waltman, state health officials, and a group of senior doctors from 10 major academic and medical institutions across the state submitted a report to state health officials about how to roll out antibody testing.
The discussions were led by Dr. James Crawford, Northwell Health’s senior vice president for laboratory services. Dr. Crawford said in an interview that as of this week, the state’s major medical institutions estimated that they could perform between 5,000 and 10,000 antibody tests per day. They expect to increase that number significantly in the coming weeks and months, he said.
Dr. Crawford said there was a “pressing need to have both parts of the equation — who has the virus and who has mounted an immune response,” but he cautioned against using antibody testing as a criterion to allow people into the world.
“To use it as a fulcrum for when someone can travel or work,” he said, “I think we have to be extremely careful as a society in doing that.”
Reporting was contributed by Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jesse McKinley and Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Accurate antibody testing is a critical tool to determine if the pandemic has slowed enough to begin restarting the economy.
By J. David Goodman and Michael Rothfeld
April 23, 2020
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-antibodies-test-ny.html
One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday that suggested that the virus had spread far more widely than known.
If the pattern holds, the results from random testing of 3,000 people raised the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers — as many as 2.7 million, the governor said — who never knew they had been infected had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also said that such wide infection might mean that the death rate was far lower than believed.
While the reliability of some early antibody tests has been widely questioned, researchers in New York have worked in recent weeks to develop and validate their own antibody tests, with federal approval. State officials believe that accurate antibody testing is seen as a critical tool to help determine when and how to begin restarting the economy, and sending people back to work.
“The testing also can tell you the infection rate in the population — where it’s higher, where it’s lower — to inform you on a reopening strategy,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Then when you start reopening, you can watch that infection rate to see if it’s going up and if it’s going up, slow down.”
The testing in New York is among several efforts by public health officials around the country to determine how many people may have been already exposed to the virus, beyond those who have tested positive. The results appear to conform with research from Northeastern University that indicated that the coronavirus was circulating by early February in the New York area and other major cities.
In California, a pair of studies using antibody testing found rates of exposure as high as 4 percent in Santa Clara County and 5 percent in Los Angeles County — higher than those indicated by infection tests, though not nearly as high as found in New York.
Public health officials recently disclosed that a woman in Santa Clara who died on Feb. 6 was infected with the virus.
In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.
State researchers sampled blood from the approximately 3,000 people they had tested over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores. The results were sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany, a respected public health lab.
Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the state health commissioner, said the lab had set a high bar for determining positive results, that it had been given blanket approval to develop coronavirus tests by the Food and Drug Administration and that state officials discussed this particular antibody test with the agency.
He said that while concerns about some tests on the market were valid, the state’s test was reliable enough to determine immunity — and, possibly, send people back to the office.
“It is a way to say this person had the disease and they can go back into the work force,” Dr. Zucker said. “A strong test like we have can tell you that you have antibodies.”
But he cautioned that the length of any such immunity remained unknown. “The amount of time, we need to see. We don’t know that yet,” he said, adding, “They will last a while.”
Unlike so-called diagnostic tests, which determine whether someone is infected, often using nasal swabs, blood tests for Covid-19 antibodies are intended to reveal whether a person was previously exposed and has developed an immune response. Some tests also measure the amount of antibodies present.
Hours before Mr. Cuomo’s presentation, a top health official in New York City expressed general skepticism about the utility of antibody tests — especially those on the private market — when it comes to questions of immunity and critical decisions over social distancing and reopening the economy.
Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis, the city’s top official for disease control, wrote in an email alert on Wednesday that such tests “may produce false negative or false positive results,” pointing to “significant voids” in using the science to pinpoint immunity.
The alert, sent to medical providers and other subscribers, went on to warn that the consequences of relying on potentially false results may lead to “providing patients incorrect guidance on preventive interventions like physical distancing or protective equipment.”
Dr. Daskalakis, early in the outbreak, had been a strong voice arguing for social distancing measures and urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools in New York City. When Mr. de Blasio resisted doing so, Dr. Daskalakis threatened to resign, a city official said. City Hall has said the mayor was never told of the threat.
Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the city health department, said the alert referred to “unvetted tests outside of a lab setting — which is not what the state is doing.”
He added that there “isn’t any daylight here” between the city and state.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, praised the overall intent of New York’s study, but said the results in this case probably skew to a higher estimate than is real because a survey of grocery store shoppers in a pandemic would not be representative.
The sampling may disproportionately include those who have either already had the illness, or those who naturally tend to go out more and so are more likely to be exposed to the virus, he said. It would miss children, teenagers and older adults who may be sheltering in place.
“It’s not a criticism. It’s more of a comment that we have to be careful about interpreting supermarket customers as a representative sample when the state was in lockdown,” he said.
State officials said the test had been calibrated to err on the side of producing false negatives — to miss some who may have antibodies — rather than false positives, which would suggest a person had coronavirus antibodies when they did not.
Health experts have worried that if tests return high rates of false positives, they could encourage people to abandon protective measures and risk worsening the virus’s spread. Others warn that the true value of coronavirus antibodies is still unknown.
The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, recommends that antibody testing be used only in research settings, and not to make medical decisions such as to permit an individual to return to work. States and the federal government are not bound by the organization’s advice.
“I’m very ambivalent about these tests, because we don’t really know yet through the science what it means to have an antibody,” said Dr. Joan Cangiarella, the vice-chair of clinical operations at NYU Langone Health’s pathology department.
“We are hoping these antibodies mean you will be immune for some time,” she said. “But I don’t think the data is fully out there to understand if that means that you’re actually immune. And if these antibodies start to decline, what’s that time frame? Does it decline in a year from now?”
Mr. Cuomo on Thursday did not talk about any potential for immunity among those previously infected.
But he did suggest, based on the survey, that if as many as 2.7 million New Yorkers had the virus, the death rate in New York from Covid-19 would most likely be far lower than previously believed, possibly 0.5 percent of those infected.
More than 15,000 people have died of the virus in the state, a figure that does not include an additional 5,000 people in New York City who were never tested but were presumed to have died from the disease.
The number of deaths has been increasing less quickly, and new hospital admissions for the coronavirus have remained relatively flat over the past three days: about 1,350 patients per day, down from over 2,000 per day last week. More than 263,000 have tested positive for infection.
Mr. Cuomo said antibody testing results, along with hospitalization numbers, would influence the state’s reopening strategy, noting that the number of people being hospitalized was still too high to consider easing restrictions.
The state’s plan would involve tracking infections as restrictions are loosened on gatherings and businesses. Antibody testing would be used, Mr. Cuomo said, for identifying coronavirus survivors who can donate convalescent plasma — the part of the blood that contains antibodies. Doctors at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and elsewhere have been testing this use of plasma for treating patients with the virus.
After the city’s alert appeared on Wednesday night, the Greater New York Hospital Association, a powerful group with close ties to the governor, sent its own message to its member hospitals, suggesting that the city’s warning was overblown and highlighting how it differed from the state Health Department’s approach.
Susan C. Waltman, the association’s general counsel, said the tests are valuable for the information they can provide about the virus, and contrasted the city’s “absolute, rather dismissive terms” with what she described as an approach from the state that “tries to put the test results in perspective.”
Last week, Ms. Waltman, state health officials, and a group of senior doctors from 10 major academic and medical institutions across the state submitted a report to state health officials about how to roll out antibody testing.
The discussions were led by Dr. James Crawford, Northwell Health’s senior vice president for laboratory services. Dr. Crawford said in an interview that as of this week, the state’s major medical institutions estimated that they could perform between 5,000 and 10,000 antibody tests per day. They expect to increase that number significantly in the coming weeks and months, he said.
Dr. Crawford said there was a “pressing need to have both parts of the equation — who has the virus and who has mounted an immune response,” but he cautioned against using antibody testing as a criterion to allow people into the world.
“To use it as a fulcrum for when someone can travel or work,” he said, “I think we have to be extremely careful as a society in doing that.”
Reporting was contributed by Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jesse McKinley and Donald G. McNeil Jr.
LKJ86
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Belleville mayor has coronavirus antibodies, believes he had COVID-19 months ago
Kaitlyn Kanzler, NorthJersey.comPublished 5:05 p.m. ET April 30, 2020 | Updated 10:35 a.m. ET May 1, 2020
Source:https://www.northjersey.com/story/n...s-positive-coronavirus-antibodies/3057925001/
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.
In a text message to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, Melham said it was the sickest he had ever been in his adult life.
The doctor told Melham he had the flu and that he would get better after rest and fluids, the release said. He did not take a flu test and said he did not travel overseas.
Melham said he later suspected he had contracted the coronavirus in November but dismissed the notion because the earliest cases in the United States weren't reported until January. His November illness is what prompted Melham to ask his doctor for the blood test. He got the results Wednesday.
Kaitlyn Kanzler, NorthJersey.comPublished 5:05 p.m. ET April 30, 2020 | Updated 10:35 a.m. ET May 1, 2020
Source:https://www.northjersey.com/story/n...s-positive-coronavirus-antibodies/3057925001/
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.
In a text message to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey, Melham said it was the sickest he had ever been in his adult life.
The doctor told Melham he had the flu and that he would get better after rest and fluids, the release said. He did not take a flu test and said he did not travel overseas.
Melham said he later suspected he had contracted the coronavirus in November but dismissed the notion because the earliest cases in the United States weren't reported until January. His November illness is what prompted Melham to ask his doctor for the blood test. He got the results Wednesday.
Menthol
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Many people are also saying the same thing on Twitter.
It said around October-December, there were so many people, like thousands, have the same sickness in their town.
I think one-third of the population in some places in USA already has the anti-body is true.
Well, you see, COVID-19 is not a big deal if you just ignore it.
Tomorrow China will be blamed for overreacting that created unnecessary panic worldwide.
I think China did the right thing for containing Group B from Wuhan.
Despite many scientists say Group C is the son of the Group B.
But in my opinion, not the Group B from Wuhan, and then mutated to C.
But from Group B that already circulated outside Wuhan.
Nan Yang
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The narrative that US military brought the virus to Wuhan is gaining traction.
It will be a matter of time before Trump and Pompeo have a mental breakdown.
Last edited:
LKJ86
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Coronavirus Florida: Patients in Florida had symptoms as early as January
Florida on Monday night removed data from the Department of Health website that showed 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January and February, before any cases were announced to the public.
By Chris Persaud
Posted May 5, 2020 at 7:31 AM
Source:https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/...s-in-florida-had-symptoms-as-early-as-january
The novel coronavirus could have infected as many as 171 people in Florida as long as two months before officials announced it had come to the state, a Palm Beach Post analysis of state records shows.
Patients reported symptoms of the deadly virus as early as Jan. 1, when the disease was thought to be limited to China, Department of Health records reveal. The records don’t say if patients reported those symptoms to the state until months later or if local offices of the health department actively investigated the illnesses at the time or a combination of both.
The state pulled the records off its website late Monday without explanation. Department of Health officials and the governor’s office did not answer detailed questions on Tuesday.
Florida announced its first two presumed coronavirus cases on March 1. At the time, cases were not considered confirmed until reviewed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC confirmed those first two cases, in Manatee and Hillsborough counties, on March 2. The state now has recorded more than 37,000 cases of the deadly virus.
But at the time of the first two cases, 171 people across 40 counties who would later test positive for COVID-19 said they had suffered symptoms of the disease, state records show. Three of those patients were in Palm Beach County, which officially didn’t record its first two coronavirus cases until March 13. The county now has more than 3,300 cases.
Until Monday evening, when the state confirmed a coronavirus case, it publicly posted data on each case, without identifying the patient. The publicly shared data included a date that represented one of two things: when the patient first reported feeling symptoms or when the patient received a positive test result.
In the early days of January, it is unlikely patients were tested for the novel coronavirus. Such tests were tightly controlled by the CDC and limited to travelers who had been to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated. None of the 171 patients reported travel to China.
It is not clear from the data how the state treated the patients or even when they found out about their symptoms.
The entire dataset disappeared from the state website Monday only to return after 7:30 p.m. without the information relating to the timing of the symptoms.
An analysis of the state data, which has been downloaded and retained by The Post since the state started posting it in March, found these diverse early cases:
— A 4-year-old Duval County girl started feeling symptoms or had her first positive test on Jan. 1. The state did not officially record her case until April 8.
— An 84-year-old Palm Beach County man who had not traveled, but was hospitalized, had symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 5. But his case was not added to Florida’s coronavirus tally until April 3.
— A 48-year-old Palm Beach County woman whose symptoms or positive test results were reported Feb. 6. Her case was counted on Saturday.
— A 74-year-old Palm Beach County woman with symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 23, whose case was recorded by the state on April 4. She reported no out-of-state travel and she came into contact with someone carrying the virus.
— A 65-year-old man in Broward County who had traveled to the Cayman Islands listed symptoms or a positive test on Jan. 4 but his case was not recorded until March 7.
— A 30-year-old Broward County man, whose symptoms or first positive result came on Feb. 25, died. His case was added March 15.
— A 65-year-old man in Sarasota County who had traveled to California and came into contact with an infected person reported symptoms or had a positive result on Feb. 23. State health officials added his case April 6.
Counties where early cases were reported included Broward (31 cases), Miami-Dade (26), Hillsborough (9), Pinellas (10), Orange (9) and Duval (7) and Martin (one case).
Among the 171 patients were 105 women and 66 men. They ranged in age from 4 to 91.
Even though the disease was thought confined to China before January, most of the early patients hadn’t traveled: 103 reported no travel while just 52 said they had.
Three Florida residents whose testing or symptom dates were in January and February had traveled from Japan, where the Diamond Princess cruise ship sailed from Yokohama on Jan. 20, visiting China and southeast Asia.
More than 700 people on the ship would test positive for coronavirus. The ship was quarantined in early February and its passengers released on Feb. 19.
Only six people in Florida whose tests or symptoms started before March were not Florida residents. Their symptoms or positive results started appearing in mid- to late February. Their cases originated in Orange, Flagler, Sarasota, Hillsborough, St. Johns and Jackson counties.
The first report of a coronavirus-related death in the United States came Feb. 29 in the Seattle area. But medical officials there later learned that the virus had killed two more people on Feb. 26.
And then autopsies conducted in Santa Clara County, Calif., confirmed COVID-19 had killed two residents on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17.
In January, when the United States confirmed its first coronavirus infection — a Washington man who returned home from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated — the disease already had spread to thousands of Americans, researchers now estimate.
As of Feb. 4, the CDC had 293 people from 36 states under investigation. It had confirmed 11 cases, nine of whom had been in Wuhan and two patients who had made close contact with travelers.
Doctors in Paris announced on Tuesday they had discovered that a patient admitted to the hospital in December had the virus. The 42-year-old man, who had a dry cough, fever and trouble breathing, said he never went to China, and his last trip overseas was in August to Algeria.
The first official reports of COVID-19 in France came on Jan. 24, attributed to a 48-year-old French citizen who had returned from China days before.
If the disease were present in Florida in the first two months of 2020, it would have been hard for state health officials to trace it, said Dr. Claude Dharamraj, who ran the Pinellas County Health Department until 2015.
A national shortage of coronavirus tests would have made tracing impossible, she said.
“We can contact those who have been exposed, but it does no good when you can’t test,” she said.
The state’s 53 local health departments feed data into a centralized system, she said. Where one county might report the onset of a patient’s symptoms, another might report on when health officials swabbed a patient’s nose. Both events would have been captured in the same column of data.
Noting recent reports of an earlier spread in America, she acknowledged that Floridians could have been suffering earlier than previously thought.
“It’s very possible that in Florida the virus was spreading and people, being at the peak of flu season, probably thought they had the flu,” she said.
Staff writer Lulu Ramadan contributed to this story.
Florida on Monday night removed data from the Department of Health website that showed 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January and February, before any cases were announced to the public.
By Chris Persaud
Posted May 5, 2020 at 7:31 AM
Source:https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/...s-in-florida-had-symptoms-as-early-as-january
The novel coronavirus could have infected as many as 171 people in Florida as long as two months before officials announced it had come to the state, a Palm Beach Post analysis of state records shows.
Patients reported symptoms of the deadly virus as early as Jan. 1, when the disease was thought to be limited to China, Department of Health records reveal. The records don’t say if patients reported those symptoms to the state until months later or if local offices of the health department actively investigated the illnesses at the time or a combination of both.
The state pulled the records off its website late Monday without explanation. Department of Health officials and the governor’s office did not answer detailed questions on Tuesday.
Florida announced its first two presumed coronavirus cases on March 1. At the time, cases were not considered confirmed until reviewed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC confirmed those first two cases, in Manatee and Hillsborough counties, on March 2. The state now has recorded more than 37,000 cases of the deadly virus.
But at the time of the first two cases, 171 people across 40 counties who would later test positive for COVID-19 said they had suffered symptoms of the disease, state records show. Three of those patients were in Palm Beach County, which officially didn’t record its first two coronavirus cases until March 13. The county now has more than 3,300 cases.
Until Monday evening, when the state confirmed a coronavirus case, it publicly posted data on each case, without identifying the patient. The publicly shared data included a date that represented one of two things: when the patient first reported feeling symptoms or when the patient received a positive test result.
In the early days of January, it is unlikely patients were tested for the novel coronavirus. Such tests were tightly controlled by the CDC and limited to travelers who had been to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated. None of the 171 patients reported travel to China.
It is not clear from the data how the state treated the patients or even when they found out about their symptoms.
The entire dataset disappeared from the state website Monday only to return after 7:30 p.m. without the information relating to the timing of the symptoms.
An analysis of the state data, which has been downloaded and retained by The Post since the state started posting it in March, found these diverse early cases:
— A 4-year-old Duval County girl started feeling symptoms or had her first positive test on Jan. 1. The state did not officially record her case until April 8.
— An 84-year-old Palm Beach County man who had not traveled, but was hospitalized, had symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 5. But his case was not added to Florida’s coronavirus tally until April 3.
— A 48-year-old Palm Beach County woman whose symptoms or positive test results were reported Feb. 6. Her case was counted on Saturday.
— A 74-year-old Palm Beach County woman with symptoms or a positive result on Feb. 23, whose case was recorded by the state on April 4. She reported no out-of-state travel and she came into contact with someone carrying the virus.
— A 65-year-old man in Broward County who had traveled to the Cayman Islands listed symptoms or a positive test on Jan. 4 but his case was not recorded until March 7.
— A 30-year-old Broward County man, whose symptoms or first positive result came on Feb. 25, died. His case was added March 15.
— A 65-year-old man in Sarasota County who had traveled to California and came into contact with an infected person reported symptoms or had a positive result on Feb. 23. State health officials added his case April 6.
Counties where early cases were reported included Broward (31 cases), Miami-Dade (26), Hillsborough (9), Pinellas (10), Orange (9) and Duval (7) and Martin (one case).
Among the 171 patients were 105 women and 66 men. They ranged in age from 4 to 91.
Even though the disease was thought confined to China before January, most of the early patients hadn’t traveled: 103 reported no travel while just 52 said they had.
Three Florida residents whose testing or symptom dates were in January and February had traveled from Japan, where the Diamond Princess cruise ship sailed from Yokohama on Jan. 20, visiting China and southeast Asia.
More than 700 people on the ship would test positive for coronavirus. The ship was quarantined in early February and its passengers released on Feb. 19.
Only six people in Florida whose tests or symptoms started before March were not Florida residents. Their symptoms or positive results started appearing in mid- to late February. Their cases originated in Orange, Flagler, Sarasota, Hillsborough, St. Johns and Jackson counties.
The first report of a coronavirus-related death in the United States came Feb. 29 in the Seattle area. But medical officials there later learned that the virus had killed two more people on Feb. 26.
And then autopsies conducted in Santa Clara County, Calif., confirmed COVID-19 had killed two residents on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17.
In January, when the United States confirmed its first coronavirus infection — a Washington man who returned home from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated — the disease already had spread to thousands of Americans, researchers now estimate.
As of Feb. 4, the CDC had 293 people from 36 states under investigation. It had confirmed 11 cases, nine of whom had been in Wuhan and two patients who had made close contact with travelers.
Doctors in Paris announced on Tuesday they had discovered that a patient admitted to the hospital in December had the virus. The 42-year-old man, who had a dry cough, fever and trouble breathing, said he never went to China, and his last trip overseas was in August to Algeria.
The first official reports of COVID-19 in France came on Jan. 24, attributed to a 48-year-old French citizen who had returned from China days before.
If the disease were present in Florida in the first two months of 2020, it would have been hard for state health officials to trace it, said Dr. Claude Dharamraj, who ran the Pinellas County Health Department until 2015.
A national shortage of coronavirus tests would have made tracing impossible, she said.
“We can contact those who have been exposed, but it does no good when you can’t test,” she said.
The state’s 53 local health departments feed data into a centralized system, she said. Where one county might report the onset of a patient’s symptoms, another might report on when health officials swabbed a patient’s nose. Both events would have been captured in the same column of data.
Noting recent reports of an earlier spread in America, she acknowledged that Floridians could have been suffering earlier than previously thought.
“It’s very possible that in Florida the virus was spreading and people, being at the peak of flu season, probably thought they had the flu,” she said.
Staff writer Lulu Ramadan contributed to this story.
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