COVID-19 antibodies found in two Washington State residents who believed they had the flu late last year challenge the official Wuhan virus timeline. Both victims fell ill in December, weeks earlier than the virus is officially said to have arrived here on January 15. With an incubation period generally around two weeks, that means the Wuhan virus could have arrived on American shores as early as the first week of December. The Seattle Times reports:
“When I got sick, I didn’t even know what COVID-19 was,” said Jean, a resident of rural Snohomish County who asked only to be identified by her middle name.
But after Jean received word from her doctor earlier this month that a highly touted serology test found a sample of her blood positive for antibodies to COVID-19, she’s now convinced the official timeline is wrong — and public health officials say she may be right.
“Jean” is a 64-year-old retired nurse who fell ill two days after Christmas last year, with “a dry, hacking cough, a fever and body aches, and finally, a wheeze that rattled her lungs,” according to the Times. She’s one of two residents in rural Snohomish County who suffered terrible flu-like illnesses late last year and now test positive for the COVID-19 infection caused by the Wuhan virus. The second victim’s identity is not known, and no details about the case have been released.
Testing positive for COVID-19 antibodies now doesn’t necessarily mean that Jean was infected with the Wuhan virus in December, but as the story says, public health officials in Washington believe that might just be the case.
The first official case in the U.S. was recorded on January 20 in another Snohomish County resident who had returned to the U.S. from Wuhan five days earlier. These new cases beat that one by almost a month. Dr. Art Reingold, a public health epidemiologist at UC-Berkeley told the Times, “My own guess is that there wasn’t one introduction or Patient Zero,” but instead, “There were likely earlier and multiple introductions of the virus.”
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This new information from Seattle dovetails with news in April that 21% of those tested in New York City showed COVID-19 antibodies. Put all that together, and we have a situation where the Wuhan virus has been here weeks longer than originally thought, and is far more prevalent than was first believed. Wuhan flu, while extremely infectious, is far less deadly than millions have feared.
Most covid-19 deaths per one million pop.
1 Belgium 774
2 Spain 580
3 Italy 515
4 UK 499
5 France 404
6 Sweden 340
7 Netherlands 323
8 Ireland 308
9 US 257
10 Switzerland 220— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) May 14, 2020
The U.S. ranks ninth in Wuhan deaths per million, but if we leave out Andrew Cuomo’s New York, where the government purposely put the infected in nursing homes right alongside the most vulnerable, the U.S. would fall lower in the rankings.
I’m no doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV. But what this tells me is that the “Swedish model” is probably what we should have done. In Sweden, they’re taking all their lumps now and getting the first and second infection waves over with all at once.
What I’m afraid we’ll do in this country, at least in Democrat-dominated states like New York and Michigan is this: They’ll kinda-sorta end the lockdown, get their second wave, then freak out all over again. Dumb.
All those protestors being knocked by the progressive media as ignorant hicks with a death wish? They were right all along. As President Trump told Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday, “You know, if it was up to some people, let’s keep it closed for a long time … and watch the United States go down the tubes. Not gonna happen. Never gonna happen on my watch.”
Then the time to move was four weeks ago. But today, right now, will have to do.
We could have enjoyed a rapid V-shaped economic recovery if we’d kept the lockdown to 2-4 weeks. Perhaps we could have avoided calamity altogether by following the Swedish model and quarantined only the sick and the most at-risk groups. Instead, we’ll have trillions of new dollars in debt, and a country partly in economic recovery (Florida, Georgia, Texas, etc.), and partly in a recurring lockdown/economic depression.
At the very least, if this situation develops it ought to serve as an object lesson on the dangers of electing ambitious Democrats to powerful positions.
UPDATE: This just came across my desk, courtesy of PJMedia’s own Paula Bolyard.
Antibody testing places earliest Ohio coronavirus case in early January.
Details:
Six people have reported feeling ill in January – as early as Jan. 7 – according to Ohio Department of Health data released Sunday. Few details about the patients were available Monday.
A department spokeswoman couldn’t say Monday whether those people had traveled, were connected to another case or were infected through virus spread in the community. The patients were from Miami, Montgomery, Richland, Summit and Warren counties.
They were identified through antibody tests and COVID-19 symptoms, said Ohio Department of Health spokeswoman Melanie Amato. That means they are considered “probable” cases, confirmed without a polymerase chain reaction test.
The official timeline looks worse and worse all the time.
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