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California’s virus forecast brightens + No, you didn't get COVID-19 in fall of 2019

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California’s virus forecast brightens, thanks to social distancing (golden state community)
https://apnews.com/14b819bb86dceec68ad4d9571cb5b2c5

INTRO: California’s top public health official said for the first time Friday that the coronavirus might not be as devastating as state officials had feared and Gavin Newsom revealed his administration now is planning for how to reopen the state. But with Easter Sunday and sunny weather on the horizon, Newsom implored people to stay away from others to not undo the significant progress under his stay-at-home order. Across California, local government officials closed streets, parks and other public spaces to deter people from gathering.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said models state officials have created to track the virus had been showing a peak by the middle of next month but the picture has improved as people limited their movement. “Our peak may not end up being as high as we actually planned around and expected,” Ghaly said. “The difference between what we are seeing today in our hospitals may not be that much different than where we are going to peak in the many weeks to come.”

California has more than 21,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and at least 583 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, figures far lower than New York, where the infections have been most prevalent and deadly. But the key figure for California officials is the number of hospitalizations, especially those people in intensive care, which is an indicator of how many hospital beds, staff and medical equipment the state needs.

On Thursday, ICU hospitalizations rose 1.1% after falling for the first time on Wednesday. Overall, 1,145 people were in intensive care statewide, leaving ample open space for new patients. “When we are in single digits, low single digits, that’s a very good day,” Newsom said.

California was quick to order residents to stay at home to contain the spread of the virus, forcing schools and nonessential businesses to close and residents to stay inside for more than a month. Newsom offered hope Friday as he said his administration was preparing “detailed strategies” about the best way to get the state back up and running. He promised to share information soon... (MORE)



No, You Did Not Get COVID-19 in the Fall of 2019 (First People Infected community)
https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/cor...-bunk.html

EXCERPT: . . . The reporter then goes on to cite Victor Davis Hanson, a Stanford-affiliated source who advances the theory that COVID-19 might have actually begun spreading in California in fall 2019. “[Stanford’s] data could help to prove COVID-19 arrived undetected in California much earlier than previously thought,” KSBW reported.

The piece has spread widely. An accompanying web story posted to the TV station’s website has been shared more than 58,300 times, and has also been picked up by SFGate. The theory is appealing to some, particularly those who had respiratory illnesses in late 2019 that they now believe could’ve been COVID-19. In their minds, that might mean they have some immunity to the virus—and if a large portion of Americans have some immunity, we can begin our move out of lockdown. But that theory has no scientific basis, and it spreads dangerous misinformation.

Let’s start with the facts. I reached out to Stanford Medicine to try to understand the goals of its antibody test, and how it relates to Hanson’s fall 2019 theory. The short answer on the latter is that it doesn’t. “Our research does not suggest that the virus was here that early,” says Lisa Kim of Stanford’s media relations team.

Neither does anyone else’s, it appears. “There is zero probability [SARS-CoV-2] was circulating in fall 2019,” tweeted Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has been tracking SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code as it has spread. Allison Black, a genomic epidemiologist working in Bedford’s lab, says this is apparent from researchers’ data. As the virus spreads, it also mutates, much like the way words change in a game of Telephone. By sequencing the virus’s genome from different individual samples, researchers can track strains of the coronavirus back to its origins. They have been continually updating their findings on Nextstrain. (In case you’re wondering, the strains have nothing to do with severity of illness. They’re simply a way to track the virus’s mutations over time.)

Richard Neher, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told the Scientist that Nextstrain researchers’ work has tracked the virus back to a single source “somewhere between mid-November and early December,” which then spread in China. The earliest cases in the U.S. appeared in January 2020, according to Nextstrain’s sequencing work... (MORE - details)
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