A startling discovery has rewritten the timeline of the pandemic in the United States: A woman who died at home in Santa Clara County, Calif., on Feb. 6 was infected with the coronavirus, and probably caught it sometime in January.
Since the woman had no known exposure from travel, her contraction of the virus suggested that it must already have been spreading in the San Francisco Bay Area long before the federal government began restricting travel from China.
Testing in the U.S. was so limited in February — because of tight restrictions and botched test-kit manufacturing — that officials didn’t identify a case of community transmission until Feb. 26 or a virus-linked death until Feb. 29.
Experts said that if officials had known that the virus already had a foothold in the United States, there would have been more urgency in February to expand testing, prepare hospitals and get more protective gear. Instead, the government’s focus was on quarantining travelers from Asia.
Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s chief medical officer, said that the woman’s death as well as another individual on Feb. 17 were newly linked to the virus and were “probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size.”
Genes trace the path: Researchers studying the virus’s genome believe that it had begun to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, coming mainly from Europe, and that it spread undetected in the Seattle area for weeks after arriving there from Wuhan, China.
Mike Baker and Sheri Fink of The Times report about how the genetically unique version of the virus that landed near Seattle has jumped to 14 other states and now accounts for one-quarter of all U.S. cases whose genetic data has been made public.
By The NYTimes