Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s health officer | AP Photo
OAKLAND, Calif. — Health officials in Santa Clara County on Wednesday described three newly confirmed deaths from the coronavirus — including one that counts as the nation’s first — as the tip of an “iceberg,“ with more previously undetected Covid-19 fatalities expected to be confirmed.
The officials late Tuesday revealed the finding that the first death to occur in the county from Covid-19 happened on Feb. 6 — three weeks before Washington state reported its Feb. 29 death, which at the time was believed to have been the first in the nation. The three earlier Santa Clara County deaths were not associated with travel to highly infected areas, indicating the virus was spreading in the U.S. much earlier than previously thought.
Advertisement
“What these deaths tell us is that we had community transmission probably to a significant degree far earlier than we had known, and that indicates that the virus was probably introduced and circulating in our community, again, far earlier than we had known,” Sara Cody, the county’s public health officer, said during a news conference Wednesday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he’s requested that coroners review cases across the state as far back as December and he expects subsequent announcements to be made “by similar efforts all across the state of California.”
“We are very pleased with the work that was done in Santa Clara County to make public that information and know we are doing the same across the state and other counties, as well, to ultimately help guide a deeper understanding of when this pandemic really started to impact California directly,” Newsom said during his daily news conference.
The Santa Clara County medical examiner-coroner conducted autopsies on three people who had flu-like symptoms and died at home — a 57-year-old woman who died Feb. 6, a 69-year-old man on Feb. 17 and a 70-year-man on March 6 — and tested samples for Covid-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed those results Tuesday.
The new finding also places a Covid-related death in Santa Clara about a month before the county confirmed its first such death on March 9.
Cody said the robust influenza season — combined with lack of testing and narrow criteria for evaluating potential cases — made it “extraordinarily difficult” to distinguish the flu from the coronavirus.
When a patient dies or is in the intensive care unit for Covid-related illness, “that means there’s some iceberg of cases of unknown size that underlie those iceberg tips,” Cody said. “With three of them, that tells us there must have been a somewhat significant degree of community transmission.”
Santa Clara County, an early U.S. epicenter of the disease, had previously confirmed its first coronavirus infection on Jan. 31 — a case associated with travel to China — and its first example of community transmission on Feb. 28. The county coordinated with five other Bay Area counties to impose the nation’s first regional shelter-in-place order on March 16.
Cody said health officials had been wondering how they would detect community transmission, given that testing early in the pandemic was limited to individuals with a known travel history. The answer, she said, was they didn’t.
While the previously undetected Covid deaths show the virus was circulating in the community earlier than thought, experts cautioned that this does not provide evidence that more people have developed antibodies that protect them from being reinfected.
Cyrus Shahpar, a director at Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit that combats global epidemics, said much still needs to be learned about asymptomatic infections and transmissions. “We don’t know anything about levels of the immunity and duration of immunity,” said Shahpar, a Bay Area epidemiologist who previously led the CDC’s Global Rapid Response Team.
In Los Angeles County, where the pandemic was confirmed later than in the Bay Area but has since caused more infections, health experts said they may not be able to test people who died in February or earlier. But Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles’ public health department, said the county has already started conducting tests on people who died from respiratory illnesses who were not screened earlier for the virus.
“In hindsight, we should’ve probably looked more carefully, particularly at deaths. But I think hindsight is beneficial as we move forward; it doesn’t really help us understand what might have happened in the past,” Ferrer said at a briefing Wednesday. “It’s unfortunate we might not have that information, but we would anticipate that across the country, particularly in travel hubs, like L.A. County is, that we were probably seeing some infection much earlier on than what we were able to diagnose.”
County officials expect to associate additional deaths with the virus as they continue their investigation.
“We anticipate this pandemic is going to be going on for a very, very, very long time. We know we do not have immunity in the population, nor do we have a vaccine,” Cody said. “Anytime that we let up on our mitigation measures, we are going to expect to see a spike in cases hospitalizations and deaths. That is certain.”
Colby Bermel contributed to this report.
Newly confirmed coronavirus deaths may not be nation’s first, California officials say
0 Comments: