https://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Early-Santa-Clara-County-coronavirus-cases-likely-15219911.phpEarly Santa Clara County coronavirus cases likely connected to China, microbiologist saysPeter Fimrite and Erin Allday April 23, 2020 Updated: April 23, 2020 1:33 p.m.
A top Bay Area microbiologist said Wednesday that the discovery of COVID-19 in a Santa Clara County woman who died three weeks before the nation’s first recorded fatality appears to be part of a cluster imported from China that he has been tracking.
The infection, found in an autopsy of the 57-year-old woman who died at home on Feb. 6, prompted state officials to direct medical examiners and coroners across California to review autopsies dating back to December, amid speculation that the disease might have been spreading months before anybody knew.
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Charles Chiu, director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, said he hasn’t yet sequenced the genomes of the three victims, but he suspects they were infected by the same coronavirus strain he had discovered in several early patients in Santa Clara County, the county with the most COVID-19 cases in Northern California.
That virus, he said, is identical to the coronavirus strain in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic started, except for a single mutation. That suggests the county was one of the first entry points for the virus and hadn’t yet spread widely around the community. It’s China origin also indicates that it wasn’t community spread.
“It indicates they are all early strains that came from travelers returning from China sometime in February,†he said. “Based on sequencing, we can tell it came into the country sometime in February when all of this began. What probably happened is that there was either one or multiple introductions in Santa Clara County, but there is no evidence that it had been circulating widely prior to that time.â€
Despite the
headline, this is an interesting article. What the headline means, worded poorly, is that Dr. Chiu believes the strain that this woman died came straight from Wuhan, with no intermediaries between her and the person who came from Wuhan.
More broadly, there are a lot of companies in Santa Clara County, aka Silicon Valley, that are either Chinese or have significant operations and/or dealings with China. That the area has a high infection rate is not too surprising. The woman who died 2/6 worked for a semiconductor company.
When the estimates are stacked up for the approximate time she was infected and when the person who passed it on to her was infected, as one person quoted in the article notes, the timeline/guesstimate of when this all started in Wuhan is getting pushed out of early December and into November (a possibility already suggested by other sources), maybe early-mid November.
UCSF is not as well known as Stanford as a premiere hospital, but they have long been peers. I think I can safely say that a UCSF doctor helped save one of my children's life.
