I’m 65, asthmatic, and living in a nursing home outside Chicago. In late January I was taken to the ER for breathing problems. I spent several days on a ventilator while they tested me. No flu, no pneumonia. Some fever, but that passed. Slight sore throat, but no strep. They sent me back here.
Daughter had similar symptoms, and heard that some authorities think it’s been here longer than thought. Of course we can’t be tested for antibodies, but that only encourages a hypochondriac. I’m antisocial so isolation has been easy.
The first reported case in the US was a man in Washington state on January 20th, 2020. But it’s more than possible that there were other cases, as some people are asymptomatic or have such a mild case that they don’t even know they had it. That’s the trouble with the lack of test kits, we don’t really know. Also, unlike in China, the US had multiple vectors of the disease coming in from all over the world. It didn’t start in one spot and spread out, it started in many different places. If you are in Chicago, then if we assume you had the virus it could have come from anywhere in the world. The first person to person confirmed case in Chicago was January 24th, a woman who traveled to Chicago from Wuhan in late December.
My brother, age 77, died on January 22, in Atlanta. He had a lot of trouble breathing and was on oxygen. There was fluid in his lungs. He had a fever. Eventually his organs started shutting down. In spite of various tests they couldn’t find the cause, but they weren’t looking for COVID-19.
Thanks. But I think he got it too early to have been COVID-19. He didn’t travel, but I have no idea who his contacts were. Without a diagnosis it’s just a huge mystery.
Michael Osterholm (PhD/epidemiologist) said that it probably jumped from animals to humans around the third week of November, 2019.
It only takes one flight from China to New York, and a sneeze, to get it going.
Given how quickly, after Seattle’s patient zero, community spread was already being discovered, and that patient zero was quick to go get himself check out, it’s unlikely that patient zero was patient zero.
Going by flight statistics by month, however, it looks like travel from China to the US is quite low in November and December and then doubles in January.
I’d venture to guess that a lot of people fly back to the US after New Years, so the first week or two of January would be my guess - though it genuinely could have been as early as December 1.
The first known case in Australia was January 20-30. It must have arrived in the USA at the same time or earlier. It’s unlikely that there were any earlier critical-care cases in Australia: they would have been retroactively identified by now. Which suggests that we didn’t get any cases in December.
I don’t know how the travel numbers for Australia vary by month We were expecting a lot of students in February, and the bush fires may have reduced travel numbers in January from China. But January 25 was Chinese New Year, when covid-19 was already epidemic in Wuhan. That’s when they were building the new nursing care facilities. The first American evacuation flight was ~Jan 28. If there weren’t cases in the USA before Jan 6, when the universities were back after Christmas, I would be surprised.
The USA is showing a doubling time of ~3 days, which would put the first case towards the end of January, but that’s just the exponential rise in the number of people tested. Taking a doubling time of ~6 days implies a first case end of November – same as China, which is why the USA has as many cases as China.
I haven’t taken care with my numbers, and I’m not quoting anyone.
My wag is that the big community spread in the US started at CES (Consumer electronics show) in Las Vegas the second week of January. Thousands of Chinese attend and/or exhibit. My company had half a dozen people that worked in Wuhan in attendance (none of which have come down with covid since then). I had multiple customers who had nasty, persistent cold/fevers in the aftermath that could have been Covid-19 (to be fair there were a number of nasty viruses making the rounds at that time).
CES has attendees from around the country and around the world.
No one was worried about Covid-19, which hadn’t been named yet, at CES. I do remember the head of HP’s supply chain had been planning to visit our factory in Wuhan 10 days after CES. During CES he insisted he could meet in Shanghai on his china trip, but plans to visit Wuhan were off owing to the virus there.
I had a friend in Chicago, who I visited at the end of January, with symptoms similar to Covid19.
Her cough was so bad, I gave her one of my extra steroid inhalers (qvar). She told me after two days of using it, she felt it helped so much she went to her doctor to get a prescription.
He gave her that and a week supply of prednisone, and told her from her xray she had bronchitis.
Still you wonder. She feels much better but not totally over it yet.
The initial hotspots seemed to be Seattle and San Francisco. However, at the moment, the only non-Red state that seems to have had rampant spread is New York and they started shutting things down not too long after the West Coast did.
That map seems unlikely, unless New York was the first place to get it and had it mixing around for longer than everywhere else until we noticed.