◼COVID-19 / GOVERNMENT Bloomberg Businessweek March 16, 202017“We are past the point of containment and broad
mitigation strategies—the next few weeks will change
the complexion in this country,” Scott Gottlieb, a for-
mer Food and Drug Administration commissioner,
said on March 8 on CBS’s Face the Nation.
This reconstruction of how the virus spread around
Seattle, based on interviews with health-care provid-
ers, first responders, relatives of patients, and aca-
demic researchers, offers lessons to places such as
Florida and California that are reporting their first
deaths. There were excruciating missed opportuni-
ties, especially at the nursing home. One shortcom-
ing was a lack of testing in a critical six-week window
when the virus spread undetected. Even recently,
some patients say, hospitals weren’t taking enough
precautions to protect staff and others from infection.
Governments are bowing to the reality of unprec-
edented, economy-killing measures seen as dras-
tic just weeks ago. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe
Conte on March 9 ordered nationwide closures of
public places including schools, gyms, and theaters
and asked everyone to stay home after hospitaliza-
tions strained its health-care system.
Although a lockdown of a U.S. city such as Seattle
is hard to imagine, something similar might happen,
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Fox News. “You
don’t want to alarm people, but given the spreadcontainment
we see, you know, anything is possible,” he said.
On Jan. 15, when the traveler to Wuhan who became
the first known U.S. case returned to Seattle-Tacoma
International Airport, he took group transportation
from the airport with other passengers, county offi-
cials said. At the time, 41 people in Wuhan had been
diagnosed with the new coronavirus, and Chinese
officials said the threat of human-to-human trans-
mission was low. A CDC notice advised Americans
who’d been in Wuhan and felt sick to seek care. On
Jan. 17 the U.S. began checks of passengers from
Wuhan at airports in Los Angeles, New York, and
San Francisco. Two days later the recent arrival from
Wuhan visited the urgent-care clinic in Snohomish
County, and the intensive response began.
In retrospect, it was already too late. Some
researchers who’ve traced the viral genomes of
patients around the world now say someone else
in the area might have picked it up between Jan.
and Jan. 19, before the traveler went to the hospi-
tal. He might have sneezed in the airport shuttle or
on some surface. “This virus is more contagious
than the flu, so any sort of exposures before he got
to the hospital would be certainly of high concern,”
says George Diaz, who leads the infectious disease
department at Providence, where the patient was
treated. By Jan. 30 the patient’s symptoms had
resolved, according to a New England Journal▼ A deserted Pike
Place Market in SeattlePHOTOGRAPH BY EIRIK JOHNSON FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK