How Long has the Chinese Coronavirus Really Been in America?

Buried behind news headlines screaming about social distancing, ventilators, and death counts is the timeline and origins of the Chinese coronavirus in America. At the daily task force briefings, media dimwits seek only to play “gotcha” with the president, begging him to take responsibility for anything and everything and quibbling over which governor asked for how many ventilators and when.

Yet they are surprisingly incurious over the origins of this virus and when it first appeared in the U.S. The basketball player and scarf lady (Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx) are happy to use models to look forward, but hopefully can take a look backward, too.

It’s hard to know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been. The forward models having been changing faster than spring weather. In mid-March, without social distancing and other measures, per the IHME model, the U.S. was looking at 2.2 million deaths.

The IHME model reduced its death projection in early April to 100,000 to 240,000 even assuming social distancing measures in place. At the time of this writing, the model now projects only 60,415 deaths, only 3% of original predictions. What changed? Social distancing was in already in place when the death predictions dropped by a factor of four.

Not to minimize any deaths, but in perspective, this is the fatality count for a bad flu season. 61,000 died in the 2017-18 flu season.

Models can also look backward, which as any gambler knows, is a much better way to win than looking forward. What do the models say about when the Wuhan virus first appeared in America?

The New York Times reports, that through analyzing viral genomes, “The coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February.” If was circulating at that time, it’s logical to assume that it first appeared weeks or months before that, perhaps in December or January.

The early cases may have been attributed to the flu. Even sick flu patients can wind up in an ICU on a ventilator. In December or January, American physicians would not have known of COVID-19 and there certainly weren’t any tests for it. Our local ICUs had some nasty flu cases in December and January, many requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), typically reserved for the sickest of the sick patients.

In the NY Metro if you walked into any urgent care with the sniffles the first things they do even before vitals are nose and throat swabs for strep and the flu. They did mine in Dec and I was in for gastroenteritis. So I think a hospital would know if the patient they are putting on hi volume O2 has the flu or not.
Oh if this was running around the country in the Fall where were the sick healthcare workers ? They are testing positive in NY everyday. MDs, RNs, EMTs, . Did this happen in the Fall.

My Mom had a really bad cold late last year I think around the Nov/Dec timeframe. No fever but difficulty breathing, lots of sputum, body aches and headache, spiked blood pressure. It sure sounds consistent with a lot of Chi-com virus symptoms. At some point she’ll get tested and is curious to find out of antibodies are present.

My MIL had similar symptoms from last Thanksgiving. A cough that wouldn’t quit, difficulty breathing, jacked blood pressure. Sadly, my MIL passed away suddenly right around Christmas so we’ll never know but it sure sounds consistent with some of the reports of symptoms.

Which is exactly what Stanford University published on March 24, 3 weeks ago.
“An epidemic seed on January 1 implies that by March 9, about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the CDC, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two-week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism … If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then … we should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lock downs.”
And from Oxford University in the UK, “research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide”

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