It must be a coincidence that the Articles of Impeachment were delivered on the same day, January 15th and a mysterious traveller from Wuhan brought the first COVlD case in the US.
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When did the coronavirus first reach the United States?
The U.S. first identified cases among travelers who had flown in from Wuhan, China, in the middle of January. Officials worked to contain them.
There is some evidence that the virus began getting a bit of traction around the end of January. To seed that late-February emergence in the Seattle area, researchers believe the spread could have begun with a traveler who arrived in the region from Wuhan on Jan. 15, or it may have been another unknown case that arrived in the few weeks that came after.
In San Jose, tissue sampling from a woman who died on Feb. 6 revealed that she was probably the first known person in the U.S. whose death was linked to the coronavirus — a strong sign that the virus may have been circulating in that part of Northern California in January.
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But was it part of a large, previously unrecognized outbreak?
Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, theorized that perhaps the woman, who worked for a company that had an office in Wuhan, was one of only a small number of people who contracted the virus at that time and that transmissions probably petered out for some reason. Otherwise, he said, the region would have seen a much bigger outbreak.
“With that kind of early introduction, we should be seeing thousands of more cases,” Dr. Rutherford said.