How coronavirus spread from patient zero in Seattle

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

143 203 6 years ago

tejohnso• 6 years ago

Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans

Is there a word or phrase for the act of poorly implementing an idea, then using the failed result as a way to discredit the idea? It's like a straw man argument but done in practice rather than in argument.

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

Politicking

the-dude3• 6 years ago

Sounds like a variant to 'starve the beast' to me.

tvanantwerp• 6 years ago

Never understood the "starve the beast" argument of reducing government. Take ten seconds to imagine being locked in a room with a starving beast--does that sound like a good idea to anybody?

narrator• 6 years ago

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science

drocer88• 6 years ago

Quarantine worked for American Somoa during the Spanish Flu : https://tedium.co/2017/10/16/american-samoa-spanish-flu/

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu "n Japan, 257,363 deaths were attributed to influenza by July 1919, giving an estimated 0.4% mortality rate, much lower than nearly all other Asian countries for which data are available. The Japanese government severely restricted sea travel to and from the home islands when the pandemic struck."

So evidence suggest it's not futile. So , you're right , maybe you're looking for "projection" or "cherry picking".

lloydatkinson• 6 years ago

I think you've misunderstood what OP meant

fps_doug• 6 years ago

Yes, it's like "it didn't work this one time, let's just scrap that idea entirely"

I wish they would apply that logic to whenever they implement more surveillance measures.

jgust• 6 years ago

Buried underneath this discussion is a lesson in incentives.

s1artibartfast2• 6 years ago

Also, there is no evidence that it didnt work.

The goal is to slow infection, not prevent it. We could hypothetically have a much greater infection rate than we do today.

crankylinuxuser3• 6 years ago

It's fair to assume that everyone will get this, and 2.5% will die.

(Edit: when I said everyone, I'm thinking of 'everyone' with regards to contagion like the normal flu that goes around. There are always outliers and people who miss it. Didn't think I had to spell that one out. Evidently I did.)

However controlling the rate of infection (coefficient of the exponent) can make the difference between hospitals able to handle the disease, versus hospitals getting completely flooded and having more die due to not enough care.

Tl;dr. You're going to get it, but you don't want everyone getting it at once.

ghostbrainalpha• 6 years ago

I hope your wrong. That the spread is somewhat contained and that a vaccine is developed before 2.5% of us die.

But I hope that someone in government is thinking like this and taking actions accordingly.

Being pessimistic isn't and overshooting your precautions is probably smarter than thinking we are going to have a "cure" in a few weeks, like POTUS said.

irrational2• 6 years ago

Why are you being downvoted? Is this the equivalent of people sticking their hands over their ears and saying “la la la la! I can’t hear you!”

It seems obvious that you are right that everyone will get it. The real quibble is what will the death rate actually be. 2.5% seems like a middle-of-the-road estimate according to current knowledge.

empath753• 6 years ago

I think _if nothing is done_ everyone will get this virus.

However, I think the lesson of china and italy is that when hospitals get overwhelmed, people will freak out and start staying home, so the rate of infection in a 'burn out' scenario is probably significantly lower than even 30 or 40%.

api_or_ipa• 6 years ago

I'd amend your post further to say that the mortality rate ∝ rate of infection b/c the more attention healthcare staff can give to each infected person, the greater their likelihood of survival will be. In addition, the illness vastly affects a subset of the population more than others, should we be able to isolate the young and elderly so that we have fewer of those cases to treat, we have a good chance at lowering the mortality rate.

notduncansmith• 6 years ago

I think it’s a form of “sandbagging”, where competitors deliberately underperform at an event.

v772• 6 years ago

Maybe we should wait a bit until figuring out what works and what doesn't in this case.

AdmiralAsshat• 6 years ago

Glass cliff would be a particular subset of this kind of thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

dathinab• 6 years ago

This quoted sentence is quite dangerous.

It's also not unlikely that there are "other" patient zeros and then there are all the thinks about bad implementation of measurements and potential spread before measurements where implemented.

Also it's all about _slowing_ spread, with the properties SARS-Cov-2 is believed to have it's likely impossible to contain it anymore in long term. (IMHO)

But each day we gain saves lives by giving us more time in finding usable medicine or even vaccine and producing it.

Additionally it reduces the load on the hospitals, if we do not slow the spread it will infect to many people at the same time to early. Which likely will lead to people not getting the appropriate medical care which likely will make the infected->death rate increase noticeable.

So it's a typical "it's not perfect so lets not do it at all straw man argument" which is this case is very dangerous as it can cost human lives.

Also given that they wrote:

County health officials located more than 60 people who’d come in contact with him,[..] fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed.

It's strange to end up with travel bans are futile? A conclusion like "it's hard to find all contact persons" would be better.

All the careful medical detective work, it’s now clear, wasn’t enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world’s efforts to contain it.

This is supper missguiding, sure in this case it's not wrong, but if a single of the 60 checked people would have had been infected this would have majorly slowed down the spread. In the end the first quote said it all: Someone was missed. And IMHO someone will most times have been missed and sometimes that one will have been infected, so the spread won't be stopped. But it will be slowed down. Which is most important.

Seenso8• 6 years ago

> Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans
Is there a word or phrase for the act of poorly implementing an idea, then using the failed result as a way to discredit the idea? It's like a straw man argument but done in practice rather than in argument.

I don't know, so I'm going to coin a term for it: dishonest experiment.

gentleman11• 6 years ago

“Bad faith” research might be more appropriate, since it sort of acknowledges bias

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

It's not the experiment that was dishonest, though - it's drawing conclusions from it as if it was conducted correctly that's dishonest.

ta9999991712• 6 years ago

Disingenuous effort.

throw0101a• 6 years ago

Is there a word or phrase for the act of poorly implementing an idea, then using the failed result as a way to discredit the idea?

First off: I'm sure the Germans have something. :)

Otherwise, some candidates:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization#Hasty_ge...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion#Red_herr...

codeulike4• 6 years ago

Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans

Yes this is complete bullshit. Wuhan and now Italy are showing that travel bans are very important.

edit: When I say Travel Ban, I'm also thinking of a soft lockdown such as Italy have implemented, which is slightly different to a travel ban in some senses.

brewdad2• 6 years ago

Wuhan shows they are important. Italy remains to be seen. Though given the reports I've read suggesting thousands of Italians returned south ahead of the travel ban, their efforts may indeed prove futile.

sib• 6 years ago

I'd call it "Mythbusters-ing" since this is pretty much how many of their episodes go.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

MB are fair but stern. Myths can be busted or confirmed, often surprisingly.

seany• 6 years ago

motte and bailey is similar in concept, but related to arguments.

empath753• 6 years ago

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

DoofusOfDeath• 6 years ago

I don't know, but it reminds me of a saying from another context: Don't judge a philosophy by its misapplication.

Edit: I think that's a quote from some well-known person, but I'm having no luck looking it up.

jolmg• 6 years ago

Is there a word or phrase for the act of poorly implementing an idea, then using the failed result as a way to discredit the idea?

It might not be that specific, but "faulty generalization"[1] might fit the bill. The Wiki article offers other phrases like "jumping to conclusions" and "fallacy of defective induction".

I would like to know if there is a name for specifically doing the poor implementation with the malicious purpose of discrediting the idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

wmeredith• 6 years ago

I believe US Republicans call this starve the beast when applying it to government programs they don't like.

adrianmonk2• 6 years ago

Starve the beast is either (charitably) a way to encourage efficiency by introducing necessary scarcity or (uncharitably) a way to deliberately create artificial failure to leverage the phenomenon being described here where people will conclude that because something doesn't work, it can't work, and therefore should be abolished.

It's related, but it's not the same thing.

EDIT: Note that I'm assuming that prematurely leaping to the conclusion isn't deliberate on the part of the reporter here. If it were, then maybe it would be the same thing.

charwalker• 6 years ago

Starve the beast? Reaganomics? Deficit Hawks?

adrianmonk2• 6 years ago

Some related phrases:

* "We already tried that."

* Once bitten, twice shy.

* Not giving the idea a chance; not giving it a fair shake.

* Giving up on an idea too easily.

* Closing your mind to a possibility.

For what it's worth, I think both the poor implementation and the wrong conclusion can be either deliberate or accidental. In this case, the poor implementation was almost definitely accidental, and most likely the reporter isn't actively trying to discredit the idea; they are just leaping to a conclusion. So the best phrase might be vary depending on whether it's just poor reasoning or an underhanded attempt to manipulate people's views.

Also, on a tangent, there's probably some validity to this kind of reasoning. Sometimes in problem-solving there are almost an infinite number of things you could try. If you spend all your resources going down one particular rat hole that doesn't seem to be working, you may never move on to exploring the rest of the solution space. In practice, it can make a lot of sense to essentially do a breadth-first search of possible approaches. The error isn't in using a breadth-first order; it's in deleting things from the FIFO queue of stuff to try eventually (or never adding). And the other common error is in assuming you can't or shouldn't try to do both in parallel.

Psyladine• 6 years ago

Perfidy, in some contexts, means a promise to act in good faith but with intention to subvert the effort.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

"Self-fulfilling prophecy" captures elements of this. Robert K. Merton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy

learc83• 6 years ago

It wasn't failed isolation procedures like the title implies. He likely infected people before he was quarantined. We also don't even know that he was patient zero--he was just the first one diagnosed.

Devagamster• 6 years ago

given his recent travel records and the genetic testing that linked his particular strain to subsequent patients, it's highly likely he was patient zero

rthomas62• 6 years ago

He flew from Wuhan to Seattle. Presumably there were many other people on that flight. How likely is it that another passenger, who was asymptomatic or just didn't seek medical care, was the real patient zero?

Tepix• 6 years ago

They got unlucky. But it‘s highly likely that the procedures successfully delayed or prevented some infections for now.

galoisgirl• 6 years ago

returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China
County health officials located more than 60 people who’d come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed.

A flight from China sounds like way more than 60 people to come in indirect contact with: same plane, same airport facilities,...

nikofeyn3• 6 years ago

the u.s. has been extremely lackadaisical regarding the virus. somehow they thought that a travel ban was an end all solution. when i came back from china in january, there wasn't any tracking, questioning, checking, or anything of the sort. it was two CDC guys standing around talking to each other, completely ignoring the masses going through customs.

s_y_n_t_a_x2• 6 years ago

The ban went into effect Feb. 2nd so it's normal they weren't stopping people.

I wouldn't judge the direction of the country based on your 2 second visual of CDC agents talking at an airport.

I don't think they think it's an end all solution, but it helps bide time for research and helps control the spread.

everybodyknows• 6 years ago

the number of active infections could reach 1,100 by March 10

That's today. How old is this article?

zaroth2• 6 years ago

It says story was posted March 9th. Written some number of days before that? And what is that stat in reference to; the whole US or just WA?

I can only guess that someone other than the author wrote the closing paragraph, but it’s clearly wrong.

KaoruAoiShiho• 6 years ago

Known cases is all about testing.

downerending2• 6 years ago

Does anyone think the number today could possibly be this low?

empath753• 6 years ago

it's probably already 10 times that.

hef198986• 6 years ago

Reported 647 across the US, 162 in Washington. Obviously that number is severely limited by testing capacity. But they are the only numbers to go with, everything else is just guessing.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

That would be in the Seattle area.

Total cases within the US -- actual, not "confirmed", likely represents a ~2 week lag. Based on reported cases, the US has seen about an 85x growth rate over 2 weeks. That would give ~150k cases presently in the US. Reported is now 640 cases, 26 deaths.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

There is no reasonable method to have a travel ban within the United States short of isolating regions by military force. At the individual level the only guarantee is imprisonment which is the not so nice way of saying you cannot leave this facility. This still requires people to volunteer to be tested!

Voluntary travel bans are only as good as the person applied to, especially in an age where self entitlement is near an all time high. Then throw in the malcontents who will just expose people for whatever irrational reason they want.

Even if we could test at point of departure what does that gain us? Say you could test at the Airport, you are positive, does the tester get taken off the line, how many people before and after? Everyone on that concourse?

jbay808• 6 years ago

If they closed airports and put up some checkpoints on the interstate to only allow select traffic through, I imagine that would cut travel pretty dramatically.

In fact, all you really need to do to bring all car traffic to a halt is start a traffic jam.

Of course, then healthy people couldn't travel either. But that was the case in Wuhan.

protomyth4• 6 years ago

If they closed airports and put up some checkpoints on the interstate to only allow select traffic through, I imagine that would cut travel pretty dramatically.

Courts tend to believe that the Privileges and Immunities Clause gives a constitutional right to travel between states. It would be a big hairy mess. In fiction, Tom Clancy explored it in Executive Orders.

grey-area• 6 years ago

Travel bans stop the health services from being overwhelmed with cases by an exponential spread within the population. The aim is not to stop infections, it is to slow the rate of infection, and there are several stages to the response so at some point tracing and containment isn't practical, but it's useful initially.

kmonsen• 6 years ago

All true, it is also to buy time to develop medicine. Every month we can push the worst cases into the future the more likely we have an efficient response.

asjw• 6 years ago

This is true in theory, but in Italy the virus arrived from a single German, and has spread through family contacts in a small province near Milan

In theory Milan should be the city with more infected people (in proportion) due to the high number of travelers and residents, it is not

Infection has spread brevi manu, travel bans have been implemented only starting from last Sunday (8th of March)

munificent• 6 years ago

Social distancing and sanitary practices are hugely important for this.

It's not clear to me that large-scale travel bans are particularly helpful. A travel ban is about containment — keeping the number of cases in a region at absolute zero. Social distancing and other local behavior changes are about lowering the rate of infection and slowing the spread of disease in an area where it exists.

The latter is clearly important because it lowers the number of people who simultaneously need medical services in any particular area. A travel ban can help that if successful and it medical resources are easily shunted from a region with zero infections to a region that has them.

But once you've got a single patient zero in a region, the travel ban is fairly close to pointless. The disease is going to start spreading locally anyway.

At the same time, the economic effects of a travel ban do affect the daily lives of lots of people. So I think it's reasonable to focus mostly on local measures and slowing the spread.

steelframe2• 6 years ago

There is no reasonable method to have a travel ban within the United States short of isolating regions by military force.

Then until we are able to develop and distribute a vaccine, perhaps this is the right course of action on a temporary basis. What is happening right now truly is extraordinary.

alasdair_3• 6 years ago

There is no way in hell I would trust Trump to use military force on US citizens due to an “emergency”

And what do you do the first time someone drives around the checkpoint? Machine gun their car?

wayoutthere• 6 years ago

Then throw in the malcontents who will just expose people for whatever irrational reason they want.

I've heard some younger folks saying they want to spread coronavirus because it will kill off some of the old people who vote republican. So yeah, even if it's not happening some people do feel this way.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 6 years ago

Just curious - where have you heard this? In real life or online? If irl, would you mind sharing your locale? If only so that older folk can avoid it...

lukev• 6 years ago

Sounds like you are mistaking gallows humor for sincere intent. I've heard the same jokes but I'm 100% sure none of the people making them actually intend to spread disease.

leggomylibro• 6 years ago

You might be overreacting to dark humor from kids who are ironically parroting what they keep hearing about their generation from their elders: "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

Don't worry, they're young enough that they won't vote either :P

madengr• 6 years ago

Yep, stands in their way of implementing socialism. Of course, AFTER they get any inheritance.

CydeWeys3• 6 years ago

It's easy enough to shut down all planes, trains, and busses, and then beyond that you just need to start putting checkpoints on the largest roads/highways/bridges. You can effectively shut down most long distance travel relatively easily.

dang2• 6 years ago

(This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22535953)

cafard2• 6 years ago

Travel bans: In the days when I traveled for work, I would occasionally catch a train back to Washington, DC, from New York. I would see a bunch of guys in suits get off in Wilmington, Delaware. Had you asked me, I was traveling. Had you asked them, they were commuting.

The commuter rail lines to Washington extend to Havre de Grace in the northeast and Spotsylvania in the south. Those are getting pretty close to Wilmington and Richmond commuter territory.

mzs• 6 years ago

Halt the sale of gasoline and public transit.

m0zg• 6 years ago

> short of isolating regions by military force

There are more guns in this country than there are people. The use of large scale "military force" against the population for any reason is, therefore, not a realistic proposition, by design.

ConfusedDog• 6 years ago

Considering flying from WuHan to Seattle, there would be more than a few people could be infected on the plane, at the airport. Yeah, it would have already spread prior to the lockdown. It doesn't really say anything about the effectiveness of Ebola-style Lockdown at all...

hef198986• 6 years ago

But the title sounds better that way. Why resort to calm, fact base reporting when clickbaiting is the alternative?

jonplackett• 6 years ago

I find reading this irritating because of the logical gaps in arguments.

The whole lead in to this doesn't hold together. They say this guy was patient zero but did everything right - as if to say that wan't enough, but then fail to explain how he spread anything. Maybe he didn't? Maybe someone else did?

alistairSH• 6 years ago

The author completely misses the people on the airplane. They started the analysis with his public transport from airport to home.

v772• 6 years ago

This was not a great article.

ComputerGuru3• 6 years ago

Do we know how long 2019-ncov can survive on contaminated inorganic surfaces if not sanitized?

sp332• 6 years ago

At least 24 hours, possibly 48. There are a few similar viruses that can survive up to 9 days if they are humid and cold (near freezing). https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-670... But we don't have good info for SARS-CoV-2 specifically.

ComputerGuru3• 6 years ago

Thanks. Earlier this year we closed our school for two days plus the weekend to disinfect after we had an unprecedented near twenty percent of the student body absent due to an incredibly virulent strain of the flu. Trying to keep all these factors in mind while we make decisions on remote learning for this mess.

ebg13• 6 years ago

https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-670...

"Human coronaviruses can remain infectious on inanimate surfaces at room temperature for up to 9 days. At a temperature of 30°C or more the duration of persistence is shorter. Veterinary coronaviruses have been shown to persist even longer for 28 d."

zaroth2• 6 years ago

On Jan. 15, when the traveler to Wuhan who became the first known U.S. case returned to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, ... At the time, 41 people in Wuhan had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.

Just goes to show how much the known case count lags the true infection count in the community.

fxtentacle• 6 years ago

What these measures seem to overlook is that there have been cases where people looked and felt fully healthy, didn't have fever or cough symptoms, but still had the virus in their blood.

As such, quarantining only the people that are visibly sick is not enough to prevent the virus from spreading.

hutzlibu• 6 years ago

But it slows it down, as people who do not have the symptoms also do not spread it so much as they do not sneeze.

Also, what is the alternative? Quarantining everyone? That works only to a certain amount, before the system collapses.

exegete• 6 years ago

It’s not about stopping the spread but slowing it so that medical resources aren’t overwhelmed.

davidw3• 6 years ago

What specific measures have they taken in South Korea? It seems to have been fairly effective. Lots of tests is the thing I know about. What else?

williw• 6 years ago

Everyone is wearing a mask, whether or not they are showing symptoms. SK gov has a mask delivery program through the post office. This helps limit the spread. While the US gov tells everyone to not wear a mask, unless they are showing symptoms.

bluGill5• 6 years ago

There are not enough masks in the world for everybody to wear one. The US is best rationing the masks we have to those who need them most.

In many Asian countries the air is bad enough that most people wear a mask anyway for pollution reasons. Thus there is more mask availability infrastructure in place (I don't think SK was ever that bad but I don't know)

HeWhoLurksLate2• 6 years ago

US gov tells everyone to not wear a mask, unless they are showing symptoms.

This bothers me greatly. People who wind up having symptoms cannot retroactively go and put the mask on for the week prior to them noticing.

hef198986• 6 years ago

Especially the large scale testing changes a lot. You are faster in quarantining cases, faster in following up on contact persons and you have a much better picture of the spread.

codeulike4• 6 years ago

The headline is stupid. Its pretty obvious that the transmission happened _before_ they got the patient into an 'ebola-style lockdown'. Based on another sentence in the article, you could change the title to 'Seattle's Coronavirus spread despite a lack of testing in a critical six-week window'.

My point is, its pretty obvious how you slow this thing down, and its not much to do with 'ebola-style lockdowns', its to do with lots of testing, social distancing and hand washing. South Korea has a 2 hour turnaround on tests, in the USA its still 5 days I believe.

teleclimber• 6 years ago

My reaction exactly. A more correct headline would be:

"Patient 0 spread virus prior to Ebola-style lockdown"

But I suppose that doesn't play into the reader's fears as much and therefore may not draw as many clicks.

bobloblaw45• 6 years ago

This was what I was thinking. I remember hearing that people are contagious some time before showing symptoms Also a large chunk of people only show mild symptoms. At the minimum all it would take is for them to infect a single person and for that person to only experience minor symptoms or to be not the type that goes to the hospital for some reason. This guy was on a plane 4 days prior. He might not even be the actual original person.

dang2• 6 years ago

We've changed the headling above to the article's HTML doc title. That is often a more neutral title.

RandallBrown• 6 years ago

Not sure what the turnaround time is now, but my wife works in a hospital in Seattle and they were getting tests back in a day or two.

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

South Korea has a 2 hour turnaround on tests, in the USA its still 5 days I believe.

Those kinds of inefficiencies don't have to exist. I wish I knew what the bottleneck was there. That time differential is so large that it has to be something pretty braindead that's holding the process up. Like we're still using test kits of type A when we should be using test kits of type B. Or everyone, nationally, is sending tests to a single lab with 2 staffers for evaluation. Etc etc.

The problem is, at once, solved in other places, and at the same time so glaring in our case that there is no way it can be insurmountable. We just have to get our heads out of our butts.

checker659• 6 years ago

There's no evidence to indicate that he was in fact patient zero. Just because he was the first person to be diagnosed in Seattle doesn't mean he was the person responsible for the breakout.

all_blue_chucks2• 6 years ago

On the contrary, Trevor Bedford has done extensive genetic analysis of the strains circulating in the area and has confirmed they are all descended from the one case.

s1artibartfast2• 6 years ago

Can you share a link?

How precise is the genetic analysis? Could it distinguish between if this individual is patient zero, or if they caught it from another theoretical individual on the same plane from Wuhan to seattle, who did not quarantine?

ChrisCinelli4• 6 years ago

Up to 1 week ago in California they did not let you test people that did not have contacts with people that were tested positive to COVID-19 or that have travelled in counties that have the virus.

I know a person in Menlo Park that the whole family "had CODVID-19 symptoms" (Stanford doctor's word) and they were diagnosed with viral pneumonia but they were refused of being tested (after asking permission to the CDC) and sent home asked to be in "isolation and do not tell anybody because it may spread panic." The first person to get it in the family was one of the child in school that started have symptoms at the end of Jan.

I supposed that they were not the only ones.

Even nurses dealing with patients were refused to be tested according to this video: https://youtu.be/DiqVCQv__pE

ChrisCinelli4• 6 years ago

I am not sure this is or was the policy nation wide but I have mixed feelings on how useful it may have been. I understand that more panic would make things worse in the hospitals in areas that were not prepared for massive outbreak but on the other side I wonder if somebody may have taken it a little light.

For example in the family of the person I know the youngest kid just cough a little for few days and never had a fever.

If a young child is the first person in a family being infected, you may think it is nothing serious and they may still send the kid to school.

It also did not help people making an informed decision about travelling in the area where supposedly only a handful of people had the virus.

nerfhammer• 6 years ago

Was it Steve Wozniak?

https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/1234887637845983233

ChrisCinelli4• 6 years ago

Nope. As far as I know he does not live in Menlo Park.

It's not a person that is well known like Wozniak.

If, for any reasons, conteining panic is the the goal, it does not surprise me that they would not ever want "Steve Wozniak victim of COVID-19" in the headlines.

frankosaurus• 6 years ago

The first person to get it in the family was one of the child in school that started have symptoms at the end of Jan

When you say "get it", do you mean viral pneumonia or coronavirus ?

San Mateo County's dept of health web page currently indicates 9 cases. All adults, no children. https://www.smchealth.org/coronavirus

scrumbledober• 6 years ago

because they were unable to get tested.

messick• 6 years ago

That's literally the point. Tests are getting refused so someone (like yourself) can respond with "But so-and-so says there are only X cases!!!!!"

This isn't an accident.

ChrisCinelli4• 6 years ago

The diagnose was just "viral pneumonia" and they were refused the test for COVID-19.

If they do not want to increase the number of people infected of coronavirus, they will probably give you a diagnosis of "viral pneumonia" and refuse to test you so you cannot be counted in the coronavirus toll.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

That was a CDC-imposed policy, to be clear.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/after-missteps-cd...

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

And more on that:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

How coronavirus spread from patient zero in Seattle

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