This is a very serious development, especially for people here in the Pacific Northwest. Yesterday I drove past Evergreen Health Hospital where the first death from the COVID-19 virus occurred in this country.
Two cases detected weeks apart in Washington State had genetic links, suggesting that many more people in the area may be infected.
March 1, 2020
Researchers who have examined the genomes of two coronavirus infections in Washington State say the similarities between the cases suggest that the virus may have been spreading in the state for weeks.
Washington had the United States’ first confirmed case of coronavirus, announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 20. Based on an analysis of the virus’s genetic sequence, another case that surfaced in the state and was announced on Friday probably was descended from that first case.
The two people live in the same county, but are not known to have had contact with one another, and the second case occurred well after the first would no longer be expected to be contagious. So the genetic findings suggest that the virus has been spreading through other people in the community for close to six weeks, according to one of the scientists who compared the sequences, Trevor Bedford, an associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington.
Dr. Bedford said it was possible that the two cases could be unrelated, and had been introduced separately into the United States. But he said that was unlikely, however, because in both cases the virus contained a genetic variation that appears to be rare — it was found in only two of the 59 samples whose sequences have been shared from China, where the virus originated
If the virus has been spreading undetected in Washington since mid-January, that could mean that anywhere from 150 to 1,500 people may have it, with about 300 to 500 people the most likely range, said Dr. Mike Famulare, a principal research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wa., who performed the analysis. These people “have either been infected and recovered, or currently are infected now,” he said.
Many of those people would now be in the early stages of incubating the virus, and might not yet be contagious, Dr. Famulare said.
Having just spent the last few days in Bellevue with my family, after visiting a grocery store 1,100 ft. from Evergreen Health Hospital on Thursday this hits pretty close to home.
It also means the recent flight restrictions from China and elsewhere have had little effect in slowing the spread in this region.