1st Covid-19 deaths earlier than thought: Moving Numbers as Data Comes In (symptom, virus)

[crusinsusan]

It's not a surprise, I suppose, but I imagine we'll hear more about deaths that came prior to previously believed.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/ca...-us/index.html

"...New autopsy results showtwo Californians died of novel coronavirus in early and mid-February -- up to three weeks before the previously known first US death from the virus.

These deaths now stand as the country's earliest two attributed to the coronavirus, a development that appears to shift the understanding of how early the virus was spreading in the country, health experts told CNN Wednesday.

Northern California's Santa Clara County announced the autopsy results Tuesday. The two were a 57-year-old woman who died in her home in the county February 6, and a 69-year-old man who died at home in the same county on February 17, officials said.

The United States' previously understood first coronavirus death happened on February 29 in Kirkland, Washington.
The two in California had no "significant travel history" that would have exposed them to the virus, Dr. Sara Cody, the county's chief medical officer, told reporters Wednesday in San Jose.

"We presume that each of them" caught the virus through community spread, she said.

"(This) tells us we had community transfer far earlier than we had known, and that indicates the virus was probably introduced and circulating far earlier than we had known," Cody said...."

"...Dr. Colleen Kraft, associate chief medical officer of Atlanta's Emory University Hospital, said news about the February deaths wasn't "a total surprise, given the fact that the community spread happened ... rapidly, once we found it."

"That also means that a lot more people have had this, probably asymptomatically or with mild illness, than we thought before," Kraft said Wednesday...."