First Coronavirus Case Confirmed in Washington, DC

New York Post ^ | March 7, 2020 | Vincent Barone and Steven Nelson

[nickcarraway]

The first coronavirus case had been reported in the nation’s capital.

A man in his 50s who lives in Washington, D.C., tested positive for COVID-19 Saturday, Mayor Muriel Bowser said.

The patient began exhibiting symptoms in late February and was hospitalized locally on March 5, she said.

[TChad]

Community spread. I wonder how long COVID-19 has really been in the U.S., but was not diagnosed because there were no test kits.

[Salvavida]

Once it hits the Metro.....that is all she wrote.

[cgbg]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/aipac-warns-congress-that-two-conference-attendees-have-coronavirus/

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486457-cpac-attendee-tests-positive-for-coronavirus

It has been an interesting week.

[allendale]

Given the fact that thousands of people from the Wusan epicenter entered multiple points in North America from Dec.15-Jan23, there is little doubt that the virus is here. also given the fact that there are relatively few diagnostic kits, it is likely that many more than the 500 or so documented infections exist in the United States. However it is somewhat reassuring that there have been no China or Korea like outbreaks thus far in the United States. The ICUs are not full of desperately ill people in respiratory failure with ground glass lesions noted on Chest CT scan. It just might be that Caucasians and Africans are simply not as susceptible to serious disease as Asians unless they are elderly, immunocompromised or have significant underlying pulmonary disease.

Consider the following:
1) At the Wusan epicenter there were many Caucasians and Africans living and working. They did not become seriously ill and none have been reported to die
2)The region in Italy that had the breakout is heavily populated with Chinese immigrants and Asian workers.
3) The modern Iranian population has a large Asian contribution to its population genome. The Silk Road transversed Iran and the Mongols once conquered it
4) Unless the race, age and underlying medical conditions of those afflicted as well as the severity of the disease is revealed by the CDC or the press, total numbers tell little about the nature of this disease and just who is susceptible and likely to become seriously ill. The CDC and the MSM thus far, for whatever reason have not shared that information.

[TChad]

Once it hits the Metro.....that is all she wrote.

Maybe, but that's not clear yet. Maybe it has already hit the Metro, and there are now a bunch of undiagnosed D.C. residents with sniffles but no serious illness.

[TChad]

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for posting.

I look forward to seeing the test results for the passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship. I bet we are going to learn a hell of a lot about COVID-19 over the next week.

Perhaps we'll even learn why it does not attack kids.

[RummyChick]

“Perhaps we’ll even learn why it does not attack kids.”

If I was designing a bioweapon I would make the kids the Super Spreaders. They fight off the virus but shed it all over the place.

In reality, could it be done? Who knows.

I think it is more a case that they had it and fought it off..viral load doest get high enough to test positive.

[familyop]

A St. Louis, Missouri woman who arrived from Italy is a “presumptive positive.” There’s also the case of a woman in Johnson County, Kansas (Kansas City Metro on the Kansas side), who recently traveled to the northeastern U.S.

[familyop]

A young Walmart employee in the Midwest told me on the phone that the busy store was full of mothers with sick children all day earlier today. The Walmart is right next to a major interstate trucking, commuting and vacation travel hub.

[familyop]

It does attack kids. Their symptoms aren’t as dangerous, though, and less often require hospitalization. Generally, their immune systems overwhelm the virus more quickly than the immune systems of adults.

[HandyDandy]

There’s a fungus amongus.

[calenel]

You can’t assume most, or even many, of those that left Wuhan in the early stages were infected. Perhaps they caught most of the people who were infected in the quarantines. Clearly they didn’t get everybody, but perhaps they put a crimp in it.

Based on incubation periods and the secrecy of the state governments about where it came from, I think it is far more likely that the major spreading was done by illegals coming across the border from Mexico or Canada.

And the racial stuff is essentially conspiracy theory material. Could it be true? Maybe. Is there any solid evidence to substantiate it? No, or not yet, at least. The original claims to that end were based on old, incomplete data that was at best reverse engineered to produce a predetermined result. Not properly vetted.

Our ICUs are not full, but we are weeks behind S. Korea (due to the actions of President Trump) instead of racing them for the highest case count outside of China. Trump’s early and subsequent calls were correct and probably the most he could do at the time. It may be that Italy’s patient 0 was a Pakistani engaging in virus jihad, but it isn’t just Chinese/Asians dropping like flies in Italy, Washington, Korea, etc.

Africa, Africa. There are only 2 places in Africa where they can even do real CV tests. Egypt and South Africa. Both have cases. In the rest of Africa the health care systems are so poor they probably don’t even know what’s going on. Add to that that in much of Africa life expectancies are pretty low - well under the 80/20 threshold for fatalities (80% of fatalities in people 65+) observed in western nations. Once testing gets going in Africa we’ll see what the data shows.

All in all, I strongly suspect that pollution, more than any other factor, determines how sick you will get (but what about India - I dunno). The pollution band stretches from Morocco to China. Korea, Japan and Italy are at the edges, Iran is smack in the middle of it. The West Coast gets its pollution from China and India but is clean compared to them. Then, if you are silly enough to believe the Chinese numbers, since their industry stopped and their skies cleared, CV cases have dropped to nearly zero outside of Wuhan. I don’t happen to believe them, myself.

Oh, there is another guy on here that says that Asians are *less* susceptible due to their history of flu epidemics. He cites stats from the Spanish Flu which allege that the Spanish Flu barely hit China. His contention is that we are gonna get hit harder than the Chinese. I don’t buy that, either.

[hal ogen]

Are we all dead yet?

[foxfield]

Logan Ratick has in interesting article about this on the Sara Carter blog:

A former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters Monday that the coronavirus – known as COVID-19 – may be “impossible” to contain and that kids may be secret carriers of the disease.

[John Robinson]

Moreso, children rely more on their innate immune response as they haven’t encountered nearly as many patterns to build an effective adaptive immune response. Being a novel virus, only the innate immune response is effective. As we grow older, our adaptive immune response becomes more prevalent. Generally, this is better equipped to handle the bugs in our environment. However, with something completely foreign like this, it’s more of a hindrance. Those in their golden years gradually lose their innate response entirely, and thus the high mortality rate.

[John Robinson]

South Korea is testing aggressively. IIRC, they've performed something like 100,000 tests, have 7,134 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. I'm going to call that the gold standard despite the church incident. Using that as a model, I divide SK cases by SK deaths (7134/50=142.68) then multiply that against US deaths (*19) for an estimate of US cases: 2,711. There are probably hilarious flaws with this method, but it's a start. (Using the floating petri dish [but smaller sample size] gives 696/6=116 ... *19=2,204.)

data

[familyop]

Thank you, John! I’ll use some of the words in your reply as keywords for finding more information.

Sometime since 10 o’clock, Pacific Time, I was unable to access Free Republic. Had to use something a little more radical than a proxy to access it just now. I doubt that it’s a web server problem on your end, unless a new IP or IP pool was blocked there since then (doubting that here). I’m guessing that it’s a DNS or IP problem from somewhere out my way here.

Anyone else having difficulty accessing FR now?

[mad_as_he$$]

Slow response for me.

[familyop]

“Are we all dead yet?”

No, but maybe one strain is worse than another.

US coronavirus cases hit more than 400: Frightening photo of an infected Nebraska woman, 36, being taken to a bio-containment unit is released as the outbreak grows and death toll rises to 19
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8086319/Nebraska-woman-coronavirus-36-transported-biocontainment-critical-condition.html

And this. It’s getting around a little more from unknown contacts.

First coronavirus case in Missouri tests ‘presumptive positive’
https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/state_news/first-presumptive-positive-covid—case-reported-in-missouri/article_74cac55e-60dc-11ea-bf75-e3cc6bc43f3a.html

First case of the coronavirus in Kansas has arrived in Johnson County, governor says
https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article240996156.html

Nothing to get nervous about, but it’s good to get a timely heads-up.