Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

It is revealed today that the first death in the U.S. due to COVID-19 was not in late Feb. in Washington state but on Feb. 6 in California.  The person did not travel to China and so had to get it from the community.  This means the virus was present in the U.S. in January for sure.  The patient would have to get it and got sick days later and then died days later.

So this patient was not diagnosed at that time with the virus even though it is well known by that time that this disease was a possible diagnosis.  Yet this was missed.  So how do you blame China for missing the diagnosis in November when nobody in the world knew about this virus?  I have seen many cases during my career of atypical pneumonia.  Many times we see cases of "fever of unknown origin" (FUO).  It took days or weeks to find the real origin of the fever.  Sometimes it turns to be not even an infection that caused the fever but other illnesses such as cancer. 

There are many who accuses China of cover up or slow in reacting to the disease.  But to declare a new infection among us without thorough investigation would be irresponsible.  You can see now that even when every health organization in the world knew about this virus and the genome was already identified, we missed this case in February.  So maybe we know how difficult it is to respond quickly and inform the rest of the world correctly.  We should also realize that our response to the pandemic was slow and inadequate.