The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he’d developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China.
The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.
The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar.
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.
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. In February, firefighters in Kirkland, Washington, began making frequent visits to a nursing home where residents complained of respiratory problems —evidence of continuing transmission that burst into public view a week ago when officials announced the first in a series of deaths at the facility from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
The Seattle area, which had 118 infections and 18 deaths as of Sunday, is now the center of the most severe known U.S. outbreak as virus fears roil world markets, shut down commerce and schools and cause people to stock up on food and medicine. “We are past the point of containment and broad mitigation strategies—the next few weeks will change the complexion in this country,” Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
This reconstruction of how the virus spread around Seattle, based on interviews with health-care providers, first responders, relatives of patients and academic researchers, offers lessons to places like Florida and California that are now reporting their first deaths. There were excruciating missed opportunities, especially at the nursing home. One shortcoming was a lack of testing in a critical six-week window when the virus was spreading undetected. Even recently, some patients said, hospitals weren’t taking enough precautions to protect staff and others from infection.
Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans in the face of a pathogen that’s sickened more than 110,000 people and killed more than 3,800 since authorities in China on Dec. 31 reported a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to an open-air seafood market. Governments are now bowing to the reality of unprecedented, economy-killing measures seen as Draconian just weeks ago. Italy early Sunday restricted travel in and out of the region surrounding Milan and ordered closings of schools, museums, pools, gyms and theaters, among other public places.
While a hard-and-fast lockdown of a U.S. city like Seattle is hard to imagine, something similar might happen, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News.
by Peter Robison, Dina Bass, and Robert Langreth, Bloomberg | Read more:
The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.
The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar.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.
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. In February, firefighters in Kirkland, Washington, began making frequent visits to a nursing home where residents complained of respiratory problems —evidence of continuing transmission that burst into public view a week ago when officials announced the first in a series of deaths at the facility from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
The Seattle area, which had 118 infections and 18 deaths as of Sunday, is now the center of the most severe known U.S. outbreak as virus fears roil world markets, shut down commerce and schools and cause people to stock up on food and medicine. “We are past the point of containment and broad mitigation strategies—the next few weeks will change the complexion in this country,” Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
This reconstruction of how the virus spread around Seattle, based on interviews with health-care providers, first responders, relatives of patients and academic researchers, offers lessons to places like Florida and California that are now reporting their first deaths. There were excruciating missed opportunities, especially at the nursing home. One shortcoming was a lack of testing in a critical six-week window when the virus was spreading undetected. Even recently, some patients said, hospitals weren’t taking enough precautions to protect staff and others from infection.
Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans in the face of a pathogen that’s sickened more than 110,000 people and killed more than 3,800 since authorities in China on Dec. 31 reported a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to an open-air seafood market. Governments are now bowing to the reality of unprecedented, economy-killing measures seen as Draconian just weeks ago. Italy early Sunday restricted travel in and out of the region surrounding Milan and ordered closings of schools, museums, pools, gyms and theaters, among other public places.
While a hard-and-fast lockdown of a U.S. city like Seattle is hard to imagine, something similar might happen, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News.
Image: SeaTac airport, Karen Ducey/Getty
[ed. And, expect to see much more of this: Officials: Flight Headed To New Jersey Diverted After Passengers Seated Next To Person Sneezing, Coughing Became Disruptive (CBS).]
[ed. And, expect to see much more of this: Officials: Flight Headed To New Jersey Diverted After Passengers Seated Next To Person Sneezing, Coughing Became Disruptive (CBS).]
