At the edge of the Pacific, at the foot of Mount Rainier, Seattle, the capital of the American North-West, has become the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States. As of Friday, March 13, 26 of the 41 deaths from Covid-19 have been reported across the country, and a quarter of all cases have been reported. And according to county health official Dr. Jeff Duchin, residents can expect escalation. " The equivalent of a major earthquake will shake us for weeks and weeks ", he warned on Wednesday March 11.
In the rest of the country, we wonder how an avant-garde city like Seattle, headquarters of Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft, the center of anti-globalization contestation converted into the capital of biotechnology, could have become the most important American agglomeration exhibited at Covid-19. But, according to Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, Seattle is nothing special. "The rest of the country will be in the situation we are in two or three weeks time"he predicted on Wednesday by announcing a ban on the gathering of more than 250 people in the hope of preventing the "Health crisis" does not turn into "Humanitarian disaster".
The chronology of contamination traces a history of federal bureaucracy and refusal to follow the advice of scientists, emblematic of the situation of a country caught up in speed by the spread of the virus. The first case – and the first in the United States – dates back to January 21. He was a 35-year-old man who returned on January 15 from a family visit to Wuhan, the Chinese home of the epidemic. The patient survived and the health authorities tracked down about 60 people he had met since his return. None have tested positive. Several weeks have passed without any further reports. Public health officials believed they had contained the phenomenon thanks to the controls put in place at the airport. In fact, the Covid-19 was already installed in American territory without being detected.
Never caught up
The story could have turned out differently. In the faculty of medicine at the University of Washington, an infectious disease specialist, Helen Chu, has been collecting nasal mucus samples since January as part of the flu tracing project, "Seattle Flu Study", a funded initiative by Bill Gates. She asked for permission to also test for the presence of Covid-19 in her samples. Permission denied. The federal agencies in charge of health, the Food and Drug administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), justified that the patients had not given their agreement and that the laboratory was not approved to make its own test screening.
