US Coronavirus News: First Death Reported, Emergency Declared. 68 Infected, 1 Deaths, 1 Critical, 814 Suspected Cases, 7 States Affected

The United States Of America reported its first coronavirus death a few hours ago in Washington. The man who died was in his 50s, had an underlying health conditions but no history of travel or contact with a known Covid-19 case, health officials in Washington state said at a media briefing. Dr Kayse Dahl, a spokesperson for Evergreen Health Medical Center, said the individual died in the facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland.
 

The Governor of Washington declared a state of emergency late Saturday as besides the death, more than 52 individuals at the nursing facility are sick and being tested for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease.
 
US health authorities in California, Oregon and Washington State are worried about the novel coronavirus spreading through West Coast communities because a growing number of people are being infected despite not having visited an area where there was an outbreak, nor apparently been in contact with anyone who had.
 
Medical director of Infection Control at Evergreen, Dr. Frank Riedo told Thailand Medical News, “Most local hospitals are seeing lots of individuals with severe coronavirus symptoms but it's probable that there are more cases in the community.
 
US Health authorities also reported two cases of SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus infections connected to a long-term care facility in the same suburb, Life Care Center of Kirkland. One is a Life Care worker, a woman in her 40s who is in satisfactory condition at a hospital, and the other is a woman in her 70s and a resident at Life Care who is hospitalized in serious condition. Neither had traveled abroad.
 
Health Authorities in Seattle and King County said, "In addition, over 50 individuals associated with Life Care are reportedly ill with respiratory symptoms or hospitalized with pneumonia or other respiratory conditions of unknown cause and are being tested for Covid-19. Many more positive cases are expected."
 
Dr Amy Reynolds of the Washington state health department said in a brief telephone interview, "We are dealing with an emergency evolving situation."
 
Although the number of coronavirus cases in the United States is considered small at only 68 confirmed cases so far, it is expected to grow phenomenally over the next four weeks as it is suspected that that are thousands of silent spreaders ie asymptomatic infected individuals walking around and spreading the diseases that originated from China to the masses in US.
 
One of the problems that the US will encounter is also the lack of coronavirus testing kits and testing facilities as the CDC and other agencies have only been making preparations for a small scale outbreak. Each state being allocated 200 to 2,000 test kits will not suffice as it has been seen in other countries, when the coronavirus spreads, it spreads exponentially. To further compound to the problem, numerou s batches of test kits from the CDC has been faulty on so many occasions (https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/breaking-news-massive-blunder-us-health-authority-shipped-faulty-coronavirus-test-kits-across-america-and-elsewhere)
 
To increase more rapid testing capacity, the US FDA issued an accelerated policy enabling laboratories to use tests they developed.
 
The California Department of Public Health said Friday that the state will receive enough kits from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention to test up to 1,200 people a day for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a day after Gov. Gavin Newsom complained to federal health officials that the state had already exhausted its initial 200 test kits.
 
The United States CDC knows there could be hundreds more cases of coronavirus they might have missed. That's why they've set up surveillance labs in five cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York City to look for cases. These labs, which routinely check patient specimens for flu, will start checking for coronavirus in specimens that test negative for flu.
 
Although a more detailed surveillance plan was announced about two weeks ago, but it's unclear if it's started because there's been a delay in distributing lab kits. The US CDC said Friday that more state and local labs were coming online for testing in the next few days.
 
Though the CDC has been focused on finding coronavirus among travelers from China and their close contacts, on Wednesday it announced the first US case with an unknown origin. The patient hadn't traveled to China and had no known exposure to someone with coronavirus. Since then, more cases of unknown origin have been identified in the United States.
 
Dr. Dean Blumberg, an infection disease specialist at UC Davis Medical Center, where one of the California patients is being treated, told Thailand Medical News, "That suggests that the coronavirus is out there in the community, and that means pretty much that everybody's at risk. We don't know who might be carrying it. We don't know who we can get it from."
 
Medical and epidemiology xxperts say there are several reasons there could be unidentified cases of coronavirus in the US.
 
The first reason is that early cases might have been missed.
 
Secondly, some individuals with coronavirus have no symptoms, or are just mildly ill. Even someone coming off a flight from coronavirus hotspots such as China, Italy, Japan or South Korea might attribute feeling slightly ill to something else  besides coronavirus.
 
Thirdly, some individuals traveling into the US from these hotspots might intentionally deny feeling sick because they don't want to be isolated in a hospital for two weeks. If they're on a flight from China, and they know they'll be checked for fever when they land in the US, they could take Paracetamol, Tylenol or Advil to mask the fever.
 
Also, so far 12 people have traveled through US commercial airports and were later found to be infected with coronavirus. For a period of time, these travelers were symptom-free before they were diagnosed.
 
Someone can spread coronavirus even before they develop symptoms. But health authorities have not routinely traced back all the contacts a person had before they became ill, so it's possible that some of them were missed and spread the coronavirus.
 
As a result of all these reasons, the United States could be missing on a lot of cases that can or could be already spreading the coronavirus all over the country in a rapid manner.
So far only 7 out of the 50 States in the US have reported coronavirus cases including Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Winconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts.
 
For more US Coronavirus News updates, keep checking at: https://www.thailandmedical.news/articles/coronavirus