The coronavirus was killing Americans in the US weeks before health officials, doctors or the government realized, it emerged early on Wednesday.
Health officials now say two people died from Covid-19 in California in early February before the first reported death from the disease in the United States.
Santa Clara county officials, in northern California, said they now know the people died at their homes on 6 February and 17 February. The first official recorded death in the nation from the virus was reported on 29 February in Kirkland, in the state of Washington.
The medical examiner-coroner of Santa Clara county, received confirmation on Tuesday that tissue samples obtained during autopsies and sent to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested positive for the virus, officials said.
A third such death had occurred on 6 March. Santa Clara county is south of San Francisco and includes San Jose.
“These three individuals died at home during a time when very limited testing was available only through the CDC, the Santa Clara county health department said in a statement.
“Testing criteria set by the CDC at the time restricted testing to only individuals with a known travel history and who sought medical care for specific symptoms. As the Medical Examiner-Coroner continues to carefully investigate deaths throughout the county, we anticipate additional deaths from Covid-19 will be identified,” the statement added.
The first officially confirmed case of coronavirus in the US was on 21 January, in Washington state. The latest news from California indicates to officials that coronavirus was spreading in the community by early to mid-January, much earlier than thought.
The announcement came after the California governor, Gavin Newsom, promised a “deep dive” update on Wednesday of the state’s ability to test for the coronavirus and to track and isolate people who have it, one of the six indicators he says is key to lifting a “stay-at-home” order that has slowed the spread of the disease while forcing millions of people to file for unemployment benefits.
“This will go to the obvious questions and queries that all of us are asking: When? … When do you see a little bit of a release in the valve so that we can let out a little of this pressure,” Newsom said.
Newsom said the state was testing an average of 14,500 people a day, up from just 2,000 tests a day at the beginning of April.
Still, in a state of nearly 40 million people, that’s not enough for public health officials to know for sure the reach of the highly contagious virus that is still causing outbreaks across the state in nursing homes and homeless shelters.
Newsom said he wants the state to test at least 25,000 people a day by the end of April.
California has more than 35,600 confirmed coronavirus cases and 1,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
California has been under a mandatory, statewide stay-at-home order for more than a month.
Last week, Newsom said he will not consider loosening that order until hospitalizations, particularly those in intensive care units, flatten and start to decline for at least two weeks. On Tuesday, Newsom announced intensive care hospitalizations rose 3.8%.
source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/coronavirus-killing-americans-weeks-earlier-than-thought
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