Name: New report: Coronavirus ignited in Bay Area as early as January
Brand: sfchronicle.com
SKU: sfchronicle-com-163
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

New report: Coronavirus ignited in Bay Area as early as January

preview

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe coronavirus almost certainly started spreading in the Bay Area and Washington state in late January or early February, several weeks before the first cases of community transmission were identified, according to a .The findings confirm suspicions raised in Santa Clara County last month that the virus had been circulating there since January, based on of COVID-19 whose deaths previously had not been tied to the virus.The first reported coronavirus cases in the U.S. showed up in several states in late January, among travelers who had recently returned from China, then the epicenter of the pandemic. The nation’s first cases of community transmission — the virus spreading undetected among local residents — were identified in the Bay Area at the end of February.Coronavirus CoverageBut evidence increasingly has suggested that the virus was spreading much earlier. Friday’s paper from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at flu surveillance reports, retrospective coronavirus testing of several thousand respiratory samples, genomic testing, and the early deaths in Santa Clara County.Taken together, the CDC now believes that community spread began in late January or early February, possibly from a single imported infection from China. The report suggests that a man in Washington state — at the time the first coronavirus patient identified in the U.S., on Jan. 20 — may have been the source of the initial spread of disease there.“The significance of all of this is that it was happening around us much earlier than we thought,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, UC Berkeley infectious disease expert. “Had our interventions been more aggressive earlier, we wouldn’t be nearly in the position we are in now. And we would have had substantially fewer deaths.”The report follows in late April that the first person in the U.S. known to have died from COVID-19 was a Santa Clara County woman on Feb. 6. That death was three weeks earlier than the earliest coronavirus-related fatality previously recorded, in Washington state on Feb. 28.The report’s co-authors include Santa Clara County assistant health officers Dr. Sarah Rudman and Dr. Elsa Villarino, and Dr. Michelle Jorden, the county’s chief medical examiner.It is still unknown who first carried the virus into the U.S. and when, the report said. One possible source is a Washington man who fell ill with the first reported U.S. case of COVID-19 on Jan. 19, four days after returning from Wuhan, China.The virus spread undetected throughout the Seattle metropolitan area and possibly elsewhere not long after that first case was reported, according to the CDC report. The authors said it’s possible that the man infected others before he developed symptoms, and that those people were asymptomatic and were never identified even as they went on to infect others and seed the community. It’s also possible, they said, that the man was exposed to the virus on the flight from China, and another passenger was the source of community spread in Washington.Or the source may have been someone else entirely, the authors said.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.In the Bay Area, the first known cases now are the Santa Clara County woman, who fell ill on Jan. 31 and died about a week later. An unrelated Santa Clara County man with COVID-19 then died between Feb. 13 and 17; he was found dead in his home and the exact date of death is not known.At around the same time, outbreaks of COVID-19 occurred during two consecutive voyages of the Grand Princess cruise ship, both linked to the viral strain first detected in Washington. The first death reported in California — before the Santa Clara County deaths were connected to COVID-19 — was a Placer County man who was on the Grand Princess on a trip that left San Francisco on Feb. 11; the man died March 6.The CDC report refers to the death of an “unidentified passenger or crew member” on the cruise ship as further evidence of early community spread of the coronavirus. It’s not clear if that is a reference to the Placer County man.After the virus arrived from China, other strains came from Europe in February and March, the report said. But until late February, the number of people sickened by the virus was too low to create a noticeable bump in people coming into emergency rooms with COVID-like symptoms, including fever, cough and difficulty breathing.Erin Allday and Cynthia Dizikes are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: , . Twitter: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe coronavirus almost certainly started spreading in the Bay Area and Washington state in late January or early February, several weeks before the first cases of community transmission were identified, according to a .The findings confirm suspicions raised in Santa Clara County last month that the virus had been circulating there since January, based on of COVID-19 whose deaths previously had not been tied to the virus.The first reported coronavirus cases in the U.S. showed up in several states in late January, among travelers...

public

Cynthia Dizikes

Erin Allday

Delivering the Bay Area’s best journalism every day. Subscribe and support the newsroom: http://SFChronicle.com/subscribe

New report: Coronavirus ignited in Bay Area as early as January

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS