The coronavirus may have reached Los Angeles even before China announced its outbreak

Researchers from UCLA and their colleagues at the University of Washington documented an unmistakable uptick in patients seeking treatment for coughs. The increase began the week of Dec. 22, 2019, and persisted through the end of February.

Some of those patients were treated in outpatient centers. Others came to emergency rooms, and some were ultimately admitted to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center or other hospitals operated by UCLA.

Officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first recognized that the coronavirus had reached American shores in mid-January, when a man in Washington state who had traveled to the area around Wuhan tested positive for an infection.

The researchers didn’t conduct any diagnostic tests, so they can’t say with certainty when doctors first encountered anyone infected with the virus ....But if the coronavirus had indeed been spreading under the radar since around Christmas, the pattern of patient visits to UCLA facilities would have looked a lot like what actually happened...

To look for signs of early COVID-19 patients, Elmore and her colleagues searched through more than 9.5 million outpatient visits, nearly 575,000 emergency room visits and almost 250,000 hospital admissions going back more than five years. Medical records that said a patient complained of a cough were included in the analysis.

The researchers counted a total of 2,938 patients who went to a clinic seeking help for a cough in the 13 weeks between Dec. 1, 2019, and Feb. 29, 2020. That was about 1,047 more than the average number of cough patients seen during the same three-month period in the previous five years. It was also about 739 more than the number of patients seen in the winter of 2016-17, which until this year had been the busiest cough season for clinics since 2014.

“Interesting because we live a few miles south of Stanford University and my wife got REALLY ill in mid November. I was up at our house in Idaho at the time so I did’t get it. Similar symptoms — severe lung congestion, malaise, aches. Our kids who visited said they had never seen Mom so sick as that. We’ve been wondering if she had it in mid Nov 2019.”

The inside joke in our family from across the nation from November-?????? was that only we, the weak males got the crud. Our stronger and healthier women didn’t get it or had a 24< hour virus.

I read months agp that the wesr coast had a milder version of Covid than what hit Italy and our east coast.

It is possible, but I heard this months ago as well and one would think that this would have been confirmed by now. I suspect that the difference has more to do with viral load on initial contact. People out west do not use mass transit nearly as much or live crammed in high rise apartments as often. When you are sharing a small space with an infected person your chances of getting more viral particles than your body can fight off are greater than if you pick your nose after using a shopping cart at the grocery store.

I suspect people on the west coast may have a better diet and more sun exposure.

Sun exposure may be true for people in most of California and the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington but probably not for people west of the Cascade Mountains. With a few exceptions we get less sun in Western Washington and Oregon than in nearly every other part of the lower 48. You can usually tell an older native Washingtonian because their skin is less sun damaged and wrinkled than transplants that are ten or twenty years younger.

In Washington State 63% of our “coronavirus deaths” have been people living in nursing homes and other long term care facilities. My wife's brother had an inoperable cancerous brain tumor and was on hospice care. His death was called “presumptive coronavirus” because there were no tests done before or after he died. There has been a financial incentive to call deaths from other causes coronavirus.

I am also not sure that people where we live in have a better diet; my wife is a retired nurse and taught nutrition classes for years. Her impression has been that most people around here believe all types of fad diet nonsense. And it is truly amazing the number of people we meet here who intentionally restrict entire food groups. These days this is done usually to reduce consumption of “carbs”.

The level of nutritional stupidity in this area is mind boggling. Fortunately, we are omnivores and people can survive for extended periods of time eating various types of preprocessed crap or getting almost all of their calories from bacon, hotdogs, hamburger, and sweet tasting protein bars. Sometimes they supplement their poor diets with a mind boggling array of dietary supplements. Then they complain about feeling sick, having headaches, being in constant pain and not having enough energy to exercise or engage in any type of physical activity. If coronavirus didn't take these people out then it is not much of a virus.

Over 90% of the statistics, what we read, hear or watch about coronavirus is absolute nonsense meant to only to cause people to be afraid. And it has worked. We have friends who have not allowed their kids or grandkids to visit because they are afraid of getting the virus. And we also know people whowould not allow their parents to visit because they were afraid that they would expose their children.

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