The Sarge wrote:So, let me see if I got this straight. Trump says that the governors need to take control of testing. Larry Hogan, Governor of Maryland, gets more tests on his own from South Korea, and Trump is pissed. Make sense for this administration.

CalvinBall wrote:1300 new cases and 360 deaths for PA.

We are in the midst of the peak. Have to be.

Bill McNeal wrote:Zip code level testing data for pa now available

https://experience.arcgis.com/experienc ... 1a5cb3b1d/

51 people have been tested in my zip, 6 infected.

Eem wrote:How many people in the country do we think have had this already? 10 million? 20 million?

Eem wrote:How many people in the country do we think have had this already? 10 million? 20 million?

slugsrbad wrote:

Eem wrote:How many people in the country do we think have had this already? 10 million? 20 million?

I can't find the tweet/article at the moment, but Louisiana's antibody test shows that potential positive cases were largely uncounted. Which is both reassuring and scary. If there a lot of asymptomatic people having the antibodies their plasma can be used in treatment, and social distancing may have saved a lot more lives than initially thought since it forced "healthy" asymptomatic people home.

Found the article: https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... -la-county

The Dude wrote:We also don't know when it got here

Bucky wrote:

The Dude wrote:We also don't know when it got here

scientific consensus is that if you are not in china you did NOT have it prior to january.

Bucky wrote:

The Dude wrote:We also don't know when it got here

scientific consensus is that if you are not in china you did NOT have it prior to january.

No, YOU (bar the first Chinese patients in Wuhan) did not have COVID19 prior to Jan 2020. The first documented cases in China were in late November/early Dec 2019. Scientists can “track” the origins of viruses by sequencing their genetic material. Over time, viruses accumulate mutations that make them identifiable. Think of family trees and tracing genetic mutations, this is very similar. See this article for a good explanation:
Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show
Travelers seeded multiple cases starting as early as mid-February, genomes show. New research indicates that the…
http://www.nytimes.com
UPDATE: If you are interested in the analysis mentioned in the NYTs article, here’s a great website that traces the sequencing data: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global and for the US: https://nextstrain.org/narratives/ncov/ ... ountry=USA

Experts say it's plausible that coronavirus came over to the U.S. from China before that first January case, but more testing is needed to be sure.

"Anecdotally, we've heard about some influenza-like illnesses in December and January that were a little bit atypical," said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, a professor of infectious diseases at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston. "But the thing we need to solve that puzzle is when we actually start doing testing of antibodies, not just detecting the virus."

Ostrosky said that would include taking a look at blood samples from December and January to see if the virus was already in circulation.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he believes when researchers do more testing, they will probably find the disease was in the U.S. earlier than first believed.

"I believe at the end of this, when we do look back – and we will – we will probably find that this disease was here earlier than we thought," he said. "We also know that when we closed our borders, it was very, very leaky."

heyeaglefn wrote:There was another article that said even though China thinks the first case was in November it actually could have been in September. I think we are finding out these scientists just have to take educated guesses with this stuff just like the weather.