Californians might have been exposed to Corona as early as fall says

[saibot]

This just released: data from Santa Clara shows that 50-85 times more people in the county have been infected by COVID than confirmed cases indicate.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....14.20062463v1

One inference is that the death rate is much lower than previously assumed.

[tikkasf]

Originally Posted by saibot

This just released: data from Santa Clara shows that 50-85 times more people in the county have been infected by COVID than confirmed cases indicate.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....14.20062463v1

One inference is that the death rate is much lower than previously assumed.

it is a estimate based on a random sample study from what I read. If 80 x the current confirmed cases have been exposed to the virus, that would represent approx. 6.8% of the population of that county. I think a lot more testing is needed...….the need to know who has antibodies and hence likely immune and whom is infected....but, not showing symptoms. Those individuals could be carriers of the virus and infecting others.

I know someone who has a family member who got infected with covid-19 and ended up spending over 2 weeks in the hospital. This person was in his early 50s, in good health and likely at the top of his career.

[Vision67]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/u...pgtype=Article

Coronavirus Death in California Came Weeks Before First Known U.S. Death

The earliest U.S. deaths publicly attributed to the virus had been on Feb. 26, when two people died in the Seattle area. Santa Clara County said an autopsy showed a Feb. 6 death was also related.

SAN FRANCISCO — Officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., announced late Tuesday that two residents there died of the coronavirus in early and mid-February, making them the earliest known victims of the pandemic in the United States.

The new information may shift the timeline of the virus’s spread through the country weeks earlier than previously believed.

The first report of a coronavirus-related death in the United States came on Feb. 29 in the Seattle area, although officials there later discovered that two people who had died Feb. 26 also had the virus.

But Santa Clara County officials said that autopsies of two people who died at their homes on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17 showed that the individuals were infected with the virus. The presence of the disease Covid-19 was determined by tissue samples and was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, county health officials said in a statement.

“Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,” Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “It feels quite significant.”

A Feb 6 death implies that the coronavirus was circulating during January.

I rode BART on the East Bay between Jan 16 and Jan 20. So it is possible that I was exposed.