11 ms·

Second U.S. coronavirus case of unknown origin confirmed in Santa Clara County

• heligate229 7y ago
  test kit can be in hundreds, not a lot can afford it. The governor should do something about reducing the cost for cost-effective testing.
• awb 7y ago
  TLDR; > The infected patient is an older adult woman with chronic health conditions who was hospitalized for a respiratory illness, county officials said. > This would be the 63rd confirmed case in the U.S. Of those, 44 were people who had been aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship and repatriated to the U.S., three were repatriated from Wuhan, 12 were people who had recently traveled in China and two caught it from a close family member. This week's two cases in Solano and Santa Clara counties involved people with no known exposure risk.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • jasondclinton 7y ago
    > [the] patient [...] is now at El Camino Hospital
    • gfodor 7y ago
      Mt View
      • 01100011 7y ago
        It wasn't clear from the article. I wasn't sure if it was Los Gatos or MtnV.
        • mikeyouse 7y ago
          It'll definitely be Mountain View, they're set up with a proper ICU and isolation.
• dvduval 7y ago
  It's getting real now. Wash you hands, and avoid touching your face. Plan to spend less time in close proximity to others. I saw a message at a dance studio in Monterey Park, which is like a Chinatown section of Los Angeles. The sign outside says that if you have been to China recently, please self quarantine yourself for 14 days before entering the dance studio. I could definitely notice a difference in the approach they had. They are already worried about it and they are taking steps. I'm not really sure we're ready for this thing. But it's here. It sure seems that way anyway.
  • ransom1538 7y ago
    " It's getting real now. Wash you hands, and avoid touching your face. Plan to spend less time in close proximity to others." It is airborne. This virus attacks the lungs (please google). Why on earth are people saying wash your hands. It transfers through: "respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes." Wash your hands sure, but this isn't going to save you --- watch what you BREATH.
    • zachguo 7y ago
      Droplets contaminated public surfaces like door handles, elevator buttons, etc, and one person normally touches his/her face hundreds of times per day.
    • ineedasername 7y ago
      Because there are other vectors of contact besides breathing. Since we can't stop breathing, we can at least minimize infection through other vectors, even if they represent less likely avenues of infection.
    • crooked-v 7y ago
      The virus isn't truly airborne. The respiratory droplets can be carried in the air short distances, but direct infection from that is extremely unlikely outside of someone literally sneezing in your face. This is in contrast to diseases like anthrax, where particles can be carried on air currents basically indefinitely and direct infection from the airborne disease is likely.
• panarky 7y ago
  Because the US is doing nearly zero surveillance testing, we don't know what we don't know. Maybe there's community transmission right now beyond these two cases and we don't know because we're only testing people returning from China or from the cruise ship.
  • bcrosby95 7y ago
    Yes. California is monitoring 8,400 people for corona virus. They currently have 200 test kits. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/27/gov-newsom-coronavirus-testing-kits-shortage/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/27/gov-newsom-coro...
    • kuprel 7y ago
      I read that a CT scan outperforms the lab test at detecting it
      • frisco 7y ago
        CT scans involve a lot of ionizing radiation. Definitely something to be avoided unless necessary.
        • ridgeguy 7y ago
          According to [1], a chest CT scan rad dose ranges from 4 to 18 milliSieverts. Annual background dose is ~3 milliSv. [2] states that a 100 mSv dose would increase risk of cancer by 0.5% (5/1000). [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-medical-imaging https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-me... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/air-travel-exposes-you-to-radiation-how-much-health-risk-comes-with-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/air-travel-expose...
          • hcknwscommenter 7y ago
            You cannot compare an annual background dose to the dose received in a CT scan. Similarly, the 100 mSv dose of your reference number 2 is an inappropriate comparison because it is spread out over time compared to a CT scan. Your premise is like saying, walking puts an impact of .8 J on my foot. I walk 10,000 steps a day. 10,000*.8 is 8,000 J. A bullet produces an impact of 168 J when fired from a .22 rifle into a human body. Therefore walking is much more dangerous than a bullet from a rifle.
• torpfactory 7y ago
  My wife is an ER nurse. (West Coast but not California) Kind of wondering if I’m going to have to isolate myself from her just in case. She’s almost surely going to be coming into contact with patients soon. Starting to get real for sure.
  • rconti 7y ago
    Probably not worth it, unless you're in a group most likely to die of the effects. If anything, I wonder if one would prefer to get exposed earlier rather than later. Of course, my wife works in a hospital in Santa Clara.
    • ransom1538 7y ago
      Sure if you don't mind lung scaring.
    • jessriedel 7y ago
      Even young and middle-age people have a 0.2% mortality rate, which at the US statistical value of life (~$10M) works out to $20,000. (And if you're a well-paid software developer, you can probable 5x that.) Whatever you would do to avoid losing $20k-$100k, you should probably do to avoid getting Covid-19 (modulo questions about how long immunity lasts).
      • lhl 7y ago
        One thing to note is that even though there are age range breakdowns from this initial analysis (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32064853 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32064853), there is also a breakdown based on pre-existing conditions, with Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Chronic respiratory disease, Hypertension, and Cancer being 5-10X hazard ratios vs those with no pre-existing conditions. Sadly, the paper is in Chinese, but you would probably want to look at the percentage of non-mild cases in your age bracket and adjusted for your pre-existing condition risk to see how your actual risk might be modeled: http://rs.yiigle.com/yufabiao/1181998.htm http://rs.yiigle.com/yufabiao/1181998.htm But I think we'll just have to see how the medical response is in each specific locality to really get a good idea of what the real risk is. I don't necessarily think that a dollar amount is actually the best way to think about it. It's very hard to think about what value you'd place on avoiding a hypothetical 1/500 risk of death (adjust based on percentage of population you think will contract this). Note that as a 40yo, your odds of dying period within that year is actually about 1/500: https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying You can then split this up by percentages for cause of death: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/01/16/deaths https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/01/16/deaths (Chart 2, select your age category) UK chart, but also some charts on annual death risk: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html And lastly, the almost useless CDC data/charts - they include leading causes and absolute number by cause and age-group, but not the population size so you have no idea what your odds are: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html In any case, once you have the odds down, you can place the amount of effort you'd spend relative to the amount of effort you spend on other risks.
• kaisersjc 7y ago
  Not in the news yet but there is an admission at kaiser San Jose of a potential covid-19 patient. Have all the symptoms, traveled and tested negative for flu!!
  • marcell 7y ago
    Source on this?
    • kaisersjc 7y ago
      I work there!
      • beamatronic 7y ago
        Thank you!!
      • tyxodiwktis 7y ago
        then you probably shouldn't be posting this information here.
        • Touche 7y ago
          Why?
          • baggy_trough 7y ago
            Can’t have the hoi polloi knowing facts, can we?
          • edoceo 7y ago
            In USA all these communication are supposed to go through the official channels now - it's VP Mike Pence. Tight information control from Dear Leader's right hand man is how we know everything will be OK.
            • 7y ago
• avocado4 7y ago
  Why is everything happening in Bay Area? Do local official ignore CDC protocols to spite Trump?
• naringas 7y ago
  if this gets bad enough in the 'western' world maybe the Chinese could spin the narrative into "look how well we were able to control it in the place it started" time will tell...
  • hangonhn 7y ago
    It has already happened. My parents live in China and my mom was raving about how quickly they built that hospital in Wuhan and what a great leader they have. I told her Stanford is a really great hospital. shrug
    • lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      Opinions on how well they’re handling things aside, I must say, I was pretty impressed with how quickly they built that hospital. We could never do that in the US.
      • magicsmoke 7y ago
        Not surprising considering how much practice China has building out their country's infrastructure over the past few decades. The US back in the 1900s was also handling some of the largest and most advanced civil engineering projects of the time. But after all the obvious improvements are done and demand for infrastructure dried up the US forgot how to do civil engineering like that after a few decades. In 50 years we'll probably be admiring the civil engineering in Nigeria while complaining about the outdated infrastructure in China. Countries at different stages of development are good at different things.
      • rcpt 7y ago
        Critical infrastructure to slow a deadly pandemic?? Not in MY backyard!
        • kevdragon6 7y ago
          https://www.ocregister.com/2020/02/22/why-here-costa-mesa-oc-officials-question-feds-plan-for-coronavirus-quarantine-site/ https://www.ocregister.com/2020/02/22/why-here-costa-mesa-oc...
• courtf 7y ago
  My husband is a career public health clinician who organizes vaccination clinics (has given out hundreds of thousands of vaccines for infectious disease, many for free via grants). At the state level here in US, he has mounted responses to H1N1, ebola, measles and now this coronavirus. The conventional wisdom around this outbreak, right from the beginning, has been that almost everyone on the planet will be exposed. It's no surprise this is hopping around stateside. The virus has a two week incubation period, during which the host is not infectious, but also has no symptoms, making tracking vectors difficult. In addition, after incubation there are a couple of days where the host is highly infectious, and still has no symptoms. The term for this period is "prodrome" (pre syndrome). Under certain circumstances, it's also airborne, which is can be a problem for providers. It's spreading fast because of these characteristics. Similar to flu, it is expected that this virus will find enough hosts to essentially never stop circulating. Expect to see it again next year, and the year after, etc, in perpetuity. Get your flu shots! You might prevent someone from getting very sick or dying, even if you don't see symptoms yourself.
  • jasondclinton 7y ago
    > two gestation Missing a word there. Now I'm in suspense.
    • courtf 7y ago
      Thanks! Fixed it
  • netheril96 7y ago
    Are you making a typo? The disease is definitely contagious in gestation period, which is why it is so hard to contain the spread.
    • courtf 7y ago
      I did make a typo, I should have used "incubation," not "gestation." It is not infectious during incubation, by definition. Then there is a "prodrome" period of a few days during which you would be infectious.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  My biggest fear is this virus hitting an antivax community. It’s really hard to stop a virus like this in the US because travel rate is higher while we still have high density areas. It’s very difficult to contain without resorting to Martial law type of traffic ban which is not feasible in the US.
  • ipsum2 7y ago
    Why? There doesn't exist a vaccine for the coronavirus yet.
    • bitxbit 7y ago
      There’s not going to be one for several months.
      • sgc 7y ago
        It could very well be like the flu and require vaccines for new strains every year. It has a similar single strand rna structure prone to mutations.
  • robbiep 7y ago
    What are your specific fears about it hitting an antivax community? It’s not like they have any ad- or disadvantage compared to the rest of the population wrt. Immunity at the current time
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      Even if they have no direct medical vulnerabilities, anti-vaxxers are prone to rejecting or subverting public health recommendations, eg voluntarily bringing their kids to measles parties to 'get it over with'. As recently as 2 days ago Rush Limbaugh (a conservative talk radio host) was saying that Covid-19 is essentially just the common cold and the health scare was misplaced.
      • robbiep 7y ago
• earthtourist 7y ago
  Is the main goal just to delay the widespread infection until we have a vaccine produced? It seems like this was always an impossible goal. So does it even matter when this goes pandemic? Sure, more preparation would get us more masks or something, but anything that would really help?
  • npunt 7y ago
    Think about capacity and throughput of hospitals. If everyone gets it all at once, they'll be overwhelmed and many people will die, since severe cases often need respirators, drugs, and close monitoring. The goal is to smooth out the cases over a longer period so we're less capacity limited. That means everyone taking extreme precaution with hygiene.
    • earthtourist 7y ago
      Has this ever been done for any pandemic virus? We have a "flu season" where hospitals are flooded every year. From what I read, there's not even a strong immunity after being infected with this virus, so won't people just get re-infected? It doesn't seem like there's any version of this where things are not terrible for a while. I hope I'm wrong though.
      • npunt 7y ago
        Yes, we can lower the R0 infection rate and smooth it out over a longer period of time by adopting better hygiene practices and making behavior changes. You're seeing that right now as different countries mobilize and react differently. If your re-infected comment is regarding the reports of people getting it a second time, I believe that's been debunked and is an artifact of imperfect tests rather than the virus itself. What I've read from multiple sources is that SARS family coronaviruses are pretty stable evolutionarily, so once you have immunity you should be able to fight it off in the future. This is in contrast to influenza which evolves quickly, which is why 'the big one' in pandemics is much more likely to be influenza (or a bacteria) rather than coronaviruses. See also: Spanish Flu, Black Death
• rosybox 7y ago
  It's good the company where I work, which employs about 70 people, allows us all to remote. We have a large space that we rent in a WeWork office in San Francisco but we can also work from home if we want. We have remote employees in other states and over the last year have built a very strong remote culture. All of our meetings have people who are remote, in fact often more people are remote than not these days. I imagine our company's work from home policy will help avoid downtime and really make a difference compared to companies that are just going to have to shut down when faced with the reality of this horrible virus.
• amluto 7y ago
  I am suspicious that a lot of people in the Bay Area have mild cases of COVID-19. I also see no reason to believe that the total number of cases isn’t a couple of orders of magnitude higher than reported, making the overall fatality rate quite low. Ideally, enough serological tests could be produced that a public health authority could randomly sample a population and get an actual unbiased estimate of the infection rate.
  • herval 7y ago
    Where have you read about a lot of mild cases? Genuinely curious, information about this whole thing is super sparse and evolving too fast...
    • mercer 7y ago
      Last I heard the number of 'mild' cases was very low, and low enough to not make it a talking point as far as diminishing the seriousness of the situation.
      • irq11 7y ago
        Over 80% of covid-19 cases have been mild or asymptomatic. Stop spreading fear.
        • mercer 7y ago
          Ok, Comical Ali!
          • irq11 7y ago
            I’m not sure why you feel like this is an intelligent response, but it shows others that you aren’t worth taking seriously, so keep it up.
            • mercer 7y ago
              Ok, Comical Ali!! EDIT: There's a point where engaging with nutjobs is mostly about the fun of it and warning others, whether it's the doomsday corona types or bizarre extreme deniers. You're part of the very rare latter group.
• stevespang 7y ago
  It's all in "the air" in California now . . . .aerosolized . . .
• softwaredoug 7y ago
  Serious question: don’t we pass a threshold where it’s not practical to cancel travel or events because of covid-19? It’s just going to spread anyway? For example, once, say, Olympics roll around, is there really any value in canceling them if it’s going to be everywhere anyway? Is containment even possible and, if not, is the disruption to the economy worth it?
  • thorgutierrez 7y ago
    You would still want to slow the spread as much as possible to ease the load on hospitals and make sure you can take care of as many of the serious cases as you can.
  • almost_usual 7y ago
    > Is containment even possible and, if not, is the disruption to the economy worth it? Economy over lives probably isn’t going to fly..
    • taylodl 7y ago
      Yeah but this is the United States where we've rolled up and stowed away all the social safety nets should one lose their job which is going to start happening soon if this economic disruption continues. In short, bad economy equates to lost lives. So it really isn't a question of economy over lives.
      • almost_usual 7y ago
        Right but it’s not a blatant disregard.
  • brohoolio 7y ago
    It’s about smoothing the curve so the healthcare system can absorb the influx of patients. If the healthcare system is overwhelmed then it’s a problem. Here’s a link to a great article. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-for-coronavirus-to-strike-the-u-s/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• easytiger 7y ago
  The over_reaction to this is utterly ridiculous in Europe.
  • asdf21 7y ago
    How so? Have you seen Italy’s numbers?
• sciinfo 7y ago
  The first patient was confirmed after having been intubated for >= 4 days. On average it takes 9 days from infection to ARDS, which requires intubation, according to a Lancet study. She was confirmed 5 days ago (on Feb 23rd). So she could be infected 9 + 4 + 5 = ~18 days ago. Since only around 20% of patients require hospitalization, we can estimate there are ~5 infected in her cohort. With doubling time outside China at 5-6 days, that means around 3 doublings: 2^3 * 5 = 40 infected today (Many of them will not show serious symptoms; some who will require admission have not progressed to that stage yet.) So far we have assumed that all hospitalized cases are detected, however. Some who are hospitalized might still not be detected, since without a test or a CT scan, its symptoms are similar to other viral pneumonia. Let's say infected per detected is a factor of 1.5-4. Very rough estimates: ~60-160 infected in the Bay Area now. https://www.wired.com/story/community-spread-coronavirus/ https://www.wired.com/story/community-spread-coronavirus/ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Doubling time outside China: https://ncov.r6.no/ https://ncov.r6.no/
  • TuringNYC 7y ago
    Curious why a CT scan is required as opposed to a more routine inexpensive chest XRay?
• war1025 7y ago
  I am hearing wildly varying opinions on the severity of the covid-19 situation. It seems like the general conversation here on HN has been much more doom and gloom than some other places. Anyone have opinions on why that is? Possibly the higher than normal concentration of members here on the West Coast? Maybe the general tendency of people with stronger opinions on a topic to comment on threads about that topic? Obviously there's a chance the concerns raised here are of the proper severity and everyone else is just under-reacting, but it also seems entirely possible that this is already way more widely spread than people realize and the percentages are just skewed because most people wouldn't bother going to the doctor for a cold. I guess we'll find out one way or another...
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    Doom and gloom as compared to what? I would say it's Doom and gloom before I'd call it a "hoax". If anything, I see a lot of people on here making flu-like comparisons. I'd say I'm more doomish than that, too. Because so many people are trying to conceal information to keep tourism going, stability, re-election, GDP and so on, we really don't know how bad it is. But when's the last time a flu caused a 13% sell-off? It seems pretty serious. After reading The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, I'm really starting to be convinced our collective willful ignorance is becoming problematic.
    • Scipio_Afri 7y ago
      If you compare what we know about it now to the flu, it’s 20x more lethal than the flu at current estimates with many of those who get it severe enough to go to the hospital requiring intensive care to recover. It’s legit.
      • _bxg1 7y ago
        Source on the 20x number?
        • Scipio_Afri 7y ago
• rhegart 7y ago
  I’m sick in Santa Clara County as is my household. Do I just wait it out for a few weeks? Sister called in sick but is being pressured to work
  • asdf21 7y ago
    The ethical thing to do would be to self-quarantine. Feel better soon