https://www.reuters.com/article/ ... ;utm_source=twitterCoronavirus circulated in U.S. weeks earlier than thought, mistaken for flu, health official says
此前此郡最早COVID-19死亡案例是 2月28日。Sara Cody， health officer in Santa Clara County, California，说一个57岁的妇女在2月6日确认死于COVID-19，这个女人和其他两列美国早期死亡后来确认不是流感是COVID-19的 共三人，从来没去过中国，也没去过后来知道的病毒传染中心，
本周三加州州长Gavin Newsom 要求检查整个加州58郡早至12月的死亡病例看是否死于COVID-19.以前COVID-19的测试标准很高，导致很多人漏测。这个妇女是后来身体组织送去检测才发现的。
A 57-year-old woman had died of COVID-19 on Feb. 6, far earlier than any other reported cases in the United States, said Sara Cody, the health officer in Santa Clara County, California.
It was previously thought that the first U.S. death from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, was in Washington state on Feb. 29.
News of the deaths in California could improve public health officials’ understanding of how the outbreak took hold in the United States.
Additional early deaths may also be discovered in California, further changing public health officials’ understanding of the virus’ progress. On Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he had asked medical examiners from all 58 counties in California to research deaths that might have been COVID-related back to December.
The California woman’s death and two other early cases - a 69-year-old man who died Feb. 17 and a 70-year-old man who died March 6 - were confirmed to have been COVID-19 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after it tested tissue samples.
The county had previously identified its first case of community transmission - infectious spread among people who had not been to China or other early hot spots - on Feb. 28, Cody said. But none of the three patients who died had traveled.
“What these deaths tell us is that we had community transmission probably to a significant degree, far earlier than we had known, and that indicates that the virus was probably introduced and circulating in our community far earlier than we had known,” Cody said.
Because the region was undergoing a bad flu season at the time, many cases may have been misclassified as influenza, she said.
The cases were likely “iceberg tips,” Cody said, indicating that many more people were also infected.
The three cases were discovered because the county medical examiner’s office was not satisfied that it had found the correct cause of death, Cody said. Because coronavirus tests were not available, they saved tissue samples, which they sent to the CDC.
The testing parameters at the time by the CDC restricted testing to individuals with a known travel history and who sought medical care for specific symptoms.
U.S. coronavirus deaths topped 46,000 on Wednesday, doubling in a little over a week and rising on Tuesday by a near-record amount in a single day, according to a Reuters tally reut.rs/2WVPxuE.
The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases at more than 830,000.
