The Centers for Disease Control announced late Wednesday that they have identified the first confirmed case of coronavirus in an individual who did not travel from China and has not had any obvious contact with anyone known to be infected.
The agency, which warned on Tuesday that the United States is likely to experience “community spread” of the virus that has infected more than 80,000 and killed around 2,000 worldwide, says the patient, a resident of Solano County in northern California, may, in fact, be the “first US case of ‘community spread,'” per CNN.
The patient “was admitted to UC Davis Medical Center last week but wasn’t tested until Sunday for coronavirus, according to a letter sent Wednesday to UC Davis staff and obtained by CNN. That’s because the patient ‘did not fit the existing CDC criteria’ for such testing, the letter said,” according to the news network.
Prior to this week, the CDC has largely restricted testing individuals for coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, if they did not fit the profile of a possibly infected person. All of those so far diagnosed with the virus had a pattern of travel, were returning from a country suffering an outbreak, or had close contact with another infected person. Of the 60 diagnosed cases of coronavirus in the United States, 40 tested positive after being evacuated from a cruise ship.
The CDC told CNN that they believe the case is significant because it could mark the beginning of uncontrolled spread within the continental United States.
“[It] suggests that the virus is out there in the community, and that means pretty much that everybody’s at risk,” one CDC official told media. “We don’t know who might be carrying it. We don’t know who we can get it from.”
The patient also “probably exposed other people.”
Coronavirus has been notoriously hard to cordon off, as officials in China discovered, because unlike SARS and H5N1 (or, the “Avian flu”), individuals can carry and pass the virus before they are suffering from symptoms (or, in some cases, without ever experiencing symptoms or coronavirus themselves).
There is still the possibility that the UC Davis patient, though, is not a random infection. As Hot Air points out, “Solano County, where the patient is from, also happens to be home to Travis AFB, which is where Americans who were traveling in China and on the Diamond Princess cruise ship are being kept in quarantine,” and some of those individuals have “since been released.”
It could be a question of allowing quarantined people out too early. Japan, on Thursday, reported that at least one patient who appeared to have been re-infected with the virus, according to the Hill, after making what doctors thought was a full recovery.
President Donald Trump said, in a press conference Wednesday night, that the United States was setting aside more than $1 billion in emergency funding to handle the possibility of an outbreak and to help the CDC take necessary precautions. The United States is also trying to develop a better early testing and treatment systems for the virus.