Coronavirus has been ‘freewheeling’ in California since December, says government official

… from Russia Today, Moscow

[ Editor’s Note: The after action reporting begins, and it will continue on multiple levels, starting with States archiving their own particular infection spreads. We are already pretty far along with strong indications that California was seeded early on with Covid via the huge Chinese immigrant flow back and forth, 3 million airline tickets a year.

Genetic research has already determined that New York was infected via Europe, something that our Acting President, “don’t confuse me with the facts,” will not be able to bluster away.



This of course all leads back to the early testing disaster which the CDC will be in the crosshairs now as we can clearly see in hindsight that a decentralized effort should have been in play with a proper pandemic plan. But with the CDC having the big $11 billion budget, and wanting to keep it, was happy with its being at the helm.

Trump from the beginning saw the threat of a stock market dive pulling the stock market down and his re-election prospects down the tubes with it, so he went into full denial mode. He later, and pitifully tried to wallpaper the flub over as his being the “national cheerleader”. Whoever it was on his staff that pitched that spin to him should be shot.

Some very hard decisions are going to have to made when the dying is done, starting with new international agreements on when to shut air travel down with an early infected country. Could this mean governments having to buy national airlines so the public purse always takes the hit in such a situation with a travel bans. No private airline could take such a blow.

Some are already saying that the prospect of not being able to fly internationally during pandemic alerts might need to require a very current negative test for whatever pathogens are in progress at the time. There will be no easy or low cost solutions.

Trump’s harping on how China should have moved faster will fall flat as most all other governments responded with denial when the whiff of Covid-19 was in the air. They all tried to “hope Covid-19 away” from their populations, and leaned on the early medical professionals to tow that line … Jim W. Dean ]

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– First published … April 12, 2020

Though California recorded its first case of coronavirus in late January, one Santa Clara physician and government leader says that the virus was likely “freewheeling” through the Sunshine State months before anyone took notice.

Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician and executive officer in the Santa Clara County government, told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday that the Covid-19 coronavirus “was freewheeling in our community and probably has been here for quite some time” before officials took notice in late January.

Based on data from local and federal agencies, Smith told the paper that the coronavirus was active for “a lot longer than we first believed,” probably since “back in December.” 

As the Covid-19 coronavirus first began to leak out of China in January, authorities around the world traced the movements of those infected in a bid to map the spread of what would later become a global pandemic. California’s first case – a man in his 50s – was found to have traveled from Wuhan, China, when he turned up in an Orange County hospital late that month.

Contact tracing can help public health officials quash the spread of an illness before it takes hold in a community and becomes essentially untraceable, and at the time of the man’s diagnosis, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Health Care Agency told the public that “the risk of transmission in Orange County continues to be low.”

Recognizing when a virus starts spreading through the community at large is essential, as social distancing and quarantine measures must then be put in place to slow its advance, according to recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Simply tracking down the individuals an infected person has come in contact with is no longer enough.

When it came to tracing the second case in the Bay Area several weeks later, medics were unable to discover how the patient – a woman who had been ill for weeks – had come in contact with the virus. “That means the virus is in the community already — not, as was suspected by the CDC, as only in China and being spread from contact with China,” Smith said.

Smith believes that an unusually severe flu season masked the spread of Covid-19. “Symptoms are very much like the flu. If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn’t really notice,” he explained. “You didn’t even go to the doctor.” Indeed, data from the CDC shows that since early December, hospitalizations for “Influenza-like Illness” stayed higher than at any point during the last decade, save for the unusually bad 2017-2018 flu season.

Even as recently as late February, Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic, told Americans that “If they have a fever and respiratory illness, they should assume this is influenza unless they’ve had recent travel to China.” Until March, influenza was considered the more pressing threat to public health in the US, not the coronavirus.

Flights to the US from China were only suspended at the beginning of February. Dozens of daily flights link California with China, and Chinese immigrants make up around ten percent of the San Francisco Bay Area’s population, having first flocked there to work in the mines during the gold rush of the 1850s. As such, air routes between California and China are busy, with up to three million passengers booking return journeys per year.

Chinese authorities reportedly noticed the first cases of Covid-19 in November, weeks before making the discovery public, and two months before imposing travel restrictions on the city of Wuhan. This delay on the Chinese side, as well as the delay in recognizing the community transmission on the American side, could have given the virus ample time to embed itself in California, while public health officials were distracted with the flu.

According to the LA Times, researchers from the National Institute of Health are now scouring blood banks across California looking for antibodies in samples of donated blood. These antibodies could provide evidence that people had been catching – and recovering from – Covid-19 long before authorities noticed the outbreak.

Three months after California recorded its first cases of coronavirus, just under 19,500 people in the state have fallen ill to the deadly pathogen, and more than 540 are dead. More than half a million cases have been diagnosed in the US in total, and more than 20,000 people have died. The United States now has the highest number of Covid-19 deaths of any country in the world.

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7 COMMENTS

  1. ….hey Jim, there is a good post over on Astute News that has a little Michigan flavor to it….A Killer Enterprise: how one of big pharma’s most corrupt companies plans to corner the covid19 cure market…..if these guys just made this up, they did a helluva job of it….

  2. Why are you questioning Act II in this production, namely Trump in denial? Leave that to Bill Gates, Cuomo, and Dr. Fauci. Go back to Act I; did Trump play any part in the planning, or did he have any fore knowledge of its release in Wuhan? You guys already reported that this virus was produced between 2006 and 2015 in North Carolina. Who knew about it then,… Bush, Obama? To what end? It has never made any sense that Trump would order the release of this in China, while simultaneously allowing Chinese nationals back into the US (post infection) and disavowing the dangers of this pathogen. Why? To make himself and his administration look incompetent? Does that make any sense?

    • We will need whistle blowers on this, but they will be scared to death of the Trump Mafia which many feel included the AG who has not been vert subtle about is main loyalty being to the regime. Thank God we have an election coming, versus having to wait three years. This will be a test for America about our our survivability.

    • I see one possibility where Trump could be both culpable in approving the virus release in Wuhan, as well as his administration’s confused and erratic response to the outbreak: plausible deniability, as to being responsible for its release; rather like the Henry Fonda POTUS character in the film, “Fail Safe”, ordering his own general to drop a nuclear bomb on NYC, in order to show his Soviet counterpart that the destruction of Moscow was an accident. Even so, this would seem irreconcilable to any notion by Trump that these deliberate actions would not endanger his re-election chances.

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