Was Patient Zero really Patient Zero?
Seattle’s Patient Zero Spread Coronavirus Despite Ebola-Style Lockdown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle
By Peter Robison , Dina Bass , and Robert Langreth
March 9, 2020, 1:00 PM CDT Updated on March 10, 2020, 10:06 AM CDT
The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he’d developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China.
The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and took nasal and throat swabs, and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.
The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar.
County health officials located more than 60 people who’d come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed.
All the careful medical detective work, it’s now clear, wasn’t enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world’s efforts to contain it. In February, firefighters in Kirkland, Washington, began making frequent visits to a nursing home where residents complained of respiratory problems—evidence of continuing transmission that burst into public view a week ago when officials announced the first in a series of deaths at the facility from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.