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In the first weeks of Corona's "official" entry to the US in 2020 (1), it was reported that sick people in the NY area had to pull strings or prove contact with
by redis_mlc 5y ago
In the first weeks of Corona's "official" entry to the US in 2020 (1), it was reported that sick people in the NY area had to pull strings or prove contact with a known patient or recent travel to an infected area to get tested when calling the official hotline.
So nobody who caught it on a train or in an office could confirm if they needed to quarantine, which actually happened.
If that person was later admitted to a hospital, it was game over for that hospital and any elderly people sent back to their nursing home.
1. The actual entry date was likely fall 2019 because of the Wuhan Military Games and airline travel from China to the US. SF never really had a hospitalization spike in 2020, so corona infection appears to have been spread out compared to other cities and was probably endemic in 2020.
- lrem 5y agoWasn't the first patient in France confirmed, post-factum, to have been in November or October 2019? What would be the chances that US people travel to China less than the French?
- orwin 5y ago1/ The first confirmed case in France was late-december, probably infected mid-december. So the first case in France it a least in december. We can try to infere more but this is only speculation. 2/ Well, actually... So we French have a huge Chinese immigrant population, and a lot of Chinese students. Weirdly enough, of those i met and spoke with when i was a student or at my company (including my scrum master right now), none of them came from the coastal cities. I don't know why, maybe because the universities used to be basically free for them until 2018 (and are still pretty cheap, 5k/y i think?). I wouldn't be that surprised if France was the first foreign country infected by SRAS-Cov2. Wouldn't bet on it, but wouldn't be surprised.
- redis_mlc 5y agoWe know corona was in China in Sept. 2019 from the full hospitals in Wuhan depicted in satellite fotos, and outside China around that time from sewage sampling analysis in Europe. Beyond that there aren't a lot of specifics. US health officials are reviewing death certificates, and sometimes re-classifying very early 2020 deaths as corona, but not always consistently. (The San Jose Mercury News recently had an exclusive article on this.) But there hasn't been an explanation of how SF could get corona so early (2019) yet have so few reported deaths from it.
- nradov 5y agoThere is some evidence that the virus may have been widely circulating as early as May 2019. So we can't necessarily blame the Wuhan Military Games or airline travel in Fall 2019 until we have a clearer understanding of the exact origin. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab727/6356216 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...