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Updated April 23rd, 2020 at 11:53 IST

Official: California had virus deaths in February

Two people with the coronavirus died in California as much as three weeks before the US reported its first death from the disease in late February - a gap that a top health official said Wednesday may have led to delays in issuing stay-at-home orders in the nation's most populous state.

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Two people with the coronavirus died in California as much as three weeks before the US reported its first death from the disease in late February - a gap that a top health official said Wednesday may have led to delays in issuing stay-at-home orders in the nation's most populous state.

Dr. Sara Cody, health director in Northern California’s Santa Clara County, said the deaths were missed because of a scarcity of testing and the federal government’s limited guidance on who should be tested.

What the newly reported deaths show "is that we had community transmission probably to a significant degree far earlier than we had known," Cody said.

The infections in the two patients were confirmed by way of autopsy tissue samples that were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analysis.

The county coroner's office received the results on Tuesday, officials said.

In the wake of the disclosure, Governor Gavin Newsom said he has directed coroners throughout the state to take another look at deaths as far back as December to help establish more clearly when the epidemic took hold in California.

He declined to say whether the two newly recognized deaths would have changed his decisions about when to order a shutdown. He imposed a statewide one in late March.

Officials said the two Santa Clara County patients died at home - a 57-year-old woman on February 6 and a 69-year-old man on February 17 - and that neither had traveled out of the country to a coronavirus outbreak area.

The epidemic emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December.

Family members identified the woman as Patricia Dowd of San Jose, a manager at a semiconductor company who became sick in late January with flu-like symptoms.

She appeared to recover and was working from home the day she died. Her daughter found her, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Dowd traveled to various countries several times a year and had planned to visit China later in the year, her brother-in-law, Jeff Macias, told the paper.

The first known death from the virus in the U.S. was reported on February 29 in Kirkland, Washington, a Seattle suburb. Officials later attributed two February 26 deaths to the virus.

The two newly reported deaths show that the virus was spreading in California well before officials realized it and that outbreaks were underway in at least two parts of the country at about the same time.

Because it can take one or two weeks between the time people get infected and when they get sick enough to die, the February 6 death suggests the virus was circulating in California in late January, if not earlier.

Previously, the first infection reported anywhere in the US was in the Seattle area on January 21.

On March 17, authorities across the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Clara County included, confined nearly 7 million people to their homes for all but essential tasks and exercise in what was at the time the most aggressive measure taken against the outbreak in the US.

Three days later, California put all 40 million of its residents under a near-lockdown.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough, that clear up in two to three weeks.

For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and could lead to death.

 

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Published April 23rd, 2020 at 11:53 IST

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