TOP STORIES Authorities announce 2nd coronavirus death in US

[Mrs. Overall]

Source: AP

Health officials in Washington state said Sunday night that a second person had died from the coronavirus — a man in his 70s from a nursing facility near Seattle where dozens of people were sick and had been tested for the virus.

Researchers said earlier the virus may have been circulating for weeks undetected in Washington state.

In a statement, Public Health—Seattle & King County said the man died Saturday. On Friday, health officials said a man in his 50s died of coronavirus. Both had underlying health conditions, and both were being treated at a hospital in Kirkland, Washington, east of Seattle.

Washington state now has 12 confirmed cases.

State and local authorities stepped up testing for the illness as the number of new cases grew nationwide, with new infections announced in California, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York and Washington state.



Read more: https://apnews.com/ba5ece6010e0eddf5b0af63e6e5ad880

[at140]

1. Latest data from Hubei province, where the covid-19 started

There have been 66,337 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China’s Hubei Province, where the outbreak began in December. That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that the population of Hubei is 59,170,000. The province is slightly smaller than Nebraska, but with thirty times as many inhabitants. With this sort of population density, it’s a positive sign that just .11% (roughly 1 in 1000) of the population has caught COVID-19.

[pnwmom]

2. Not caught it -- been positively tested for it. Some may have caught it and

had few or even no symptoms (but spread it to others.)

[cstanleytech]

3. So could this virus have been with us for a few months or years and the only reason we are

really seeing it in the news now is because its mutated a bit with the mutation hitting China especially hard due to their population density?

[intrepidity]

6. No

Genomic analysis has traced patient zero to the food market in Wuhan in Nov/Dec last year.

Explore this site for fascinating info:

https://nextstrain.org/

From nextstrain:

This phylogeny shows evolutionary relationships of HCoV-19 viruses from the ongoing novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. All samples are still closely related with few mutations relative to a common ancestor, suggesting a shared common ancestor some time in Nov-Dec 2019. This indicates an initial human infection in Nov-Dec 2019 followed by sustained human-to-human transmission leading to sampled infections.

[cstanleytech]

7. Thanks. nt

[pnwmom]

9. The UW/Fred Hutch doc thinks it's been here in WA at least 6 weeks.

It only got diagnosed because a boy tested negative for flu and his throat swab then got sent to the Seattle Flu study, run by top hospitals here, where they discovered it was Coronavirus.

By the Trump standard it wouldn't have been tested because the boy had no foreign travel or other known contact.

[at140]

8. you are all correct!

but still lot less of a killer than Ebola which had 90% death rate.

[pnwmom]

10. Right. There was a good article in the Atlantic that explained that because it didn't

hit everyone hard it was much more likely to make huge inroads into the population.

[pbmus]

12. 28,000 infected....11, 325 died...less than 50%

[at140]

14. Even that rate is higher by orders of magnitude than covid-19

from what I am learning so far, covid-19 is much more contagious than flu,
and effects are similar to a bad case of flu, and flu kills thousands every season,
but it is not anywhere as scary as Ebola.

[JudyM]

4. I've been reading about this virus today... they've been saying there's a 2% mortality but

when you look at the demographic breakdown it’s dramatically higher for older folks, like 10 times higher!

[Princess Turandot]

11. As of right now, the overall case fatality rate for all ages is actually 3.4%..

That's based upon 3,044 confirmed deaths divided by 89,070 cases as of 11:33 PM on 3/1.

The data is from the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases mapping project being run by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).

The data is from various governments' sources, so there may be some consistency questions, but it's the information available.

[Blues Heron]

13. That doesn't include cases outside of the healtcare system

That's only cases that were bad enough to seek medical attention and got logged into the official records.

[intrepidity]

5. How many deaths did this care facility have over the past month?

Very curious.