The Novel COVID-19 was in California Earlier Than Anyone Knew
The virus might have been in California as early as December.
Studies out of Stanford show that signs of early in February with several COVID-19 deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest that the novel coronavirus had established itself in the community long before health officials knew.
“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.
Data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local health departments shows CDC knew early on that the virus was in California.
“a lot longer than we first believe 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.”
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 virus Feb. 4. Both were in travelers returning from Wuhan, China, where the virus was rampant. Santa Clara County’s first community-spread case also became its first announced COVID-19 death.
The CDC provided testing materials to some health departments, with restrictions that confined testing and while tracking 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, 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 decided to test a hospitalized woman who had been ill for weeks. She became the region’s first case of community-spread coronavirus.
Researchers are 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.
New studies out of Stanford University and the CDC, 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 patients with symptoms discussed as coughing and and fevers. 1 in 4 turned out to have the flu. The state tested samples from 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.
“It is possible the coronavirus spread widely through the Bay Area in just two weeks,” said Dr. Benjamin Pinsky. He said Stanford’s virology clinic saw a similar increase in cases once it was cleared by the federal government to begin running its own COVID-19 tests.
Pinsky said, “the virtual invisibility of COVID-19 in February followed by an 8% infection rate two weeks later is not “incompatible I think that all kind of fits together.”
Santa Clara County acted on the CDC’s local sampling immediately. Two days after the project ended, it and five other Bay Area counties ordered residents to stay home and schools and nonessential businesses to close.
The first confirmed COVID-19 death in California was March 4 in Placer County, claiming the life of a 71-year-old man who had recently taken a cruise.
Two days later, March 6, San Jose authorities found a 70-year-old man dead in his home. The Santa Clara County medical examiner determined the man tested positive for COVID-19.
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