Placer County reports first case of coronavirus. Health officials offer more details
Placer County’s first confirmed case of new coronavirus is a health care worker at the Vacaville hospital that treated the Solano County woman now hospitalized at Sacramento’s UC Davis Medical Center, the county’s public health leaders announced Monday.
Dr. Aimee Sisson, the health officer for Placer County, said the health care worker, an employee at NorthBay VacaValley Hospital, is in home isolation with what Sisson told The Sacramento Bee were “mild symptoms” of the virus.
How long the health care worker will be isolated is unclear, Sisson said, explaining that will be “based on how long it takes for the individual to test negative for coronavirus.”
Sisson said Placer health officials were first notified of a potential case on the evening of Feb. 27, a Thursday. By Sunday, test results out of Sacramento County confirmed the case.
Sacramento County can now test for the virus. Access to tests and how quickly Sacramento returned those results was key, Sisson said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started getting diagnostic tests to state and local laboratories last week after the UCD patient was diagnosed.
“It’s great that we now have testing capability available locally in Sacramento,” she said. “It’s certainly going to make our jobs much easier.”
The health worker exposed to COVID-19 was one of 93 staffers at NorthBay VacaValley who came in contact with the patient — the first person in the U.S. known to have contracted the virus through so-called “community spread” — not after travel or close contact with someone who was infected.
The patient initially was treated Feb. 15 at the Vacaville facility before being transported — intubated and on a ventilator — to UCDMC on Feb. 19. She was not tested until Feb. 23, and the results were unavailable until Feb. 26.
County and state public health officials say they are now working aggressively to find and isolate all individuals who may have come into contact with the woman prior to diagnosis.
Since CDC initially limited testing to travelers returning from China and their close contacts who fell ill with coughing, fever and shortness of breath, no one can say how widespread the incidence of coronavirus is in the United States. The agency changed criteria for testing on Thursday, allowing county health officers to approve testing for not only close contacts but also anyone who has severe acute lower respiratory diseases that physicians are unable to explain.
“We have expected to see cases of COVID-19 in Placer County and have been planning and preparing accordingly,” Sisson said. “Given recent evidence of community spread occurring elsewhere in California, we are now encouraging the public to prepare for the likelihood of local community spread here as well, unrelated to this case.”
Dozens of nurses and health care workers from UDCMC also are being tested because they treated the Solano County patient for a week before tests from the CDC revealed she had COVID-19.
On Monday, Sacramento County Health Chief Peter Beilenson announced that an estimated two dozen UCD workers have tested negative for the virus. He declined to say how many more of the workers, who have been ordered to stay at home under quarantine, have yet to get test results back. But the early findings are positive.
“This is very good,” he said. “This is a real positive.”
Beilenson said it may suggest that this coronavirus, a cousin of the SARS and MERS viruses, is less contagious than thought. But, he warned, since the coronavirus patient was intubated by the time she reached UCD Medical Center, she was far less likely to cough, thus reducing the exposure level of those around her.
Beilenson said the county now has authorization from federal health officials to conduct tests at its local labs, and also has the OK to widen the number and type of sick people who can be tested. Health care patients in Sacramento with serious pneumonia of unknown cause now are being tested.
The new coronavirus has killed six people in Washington state and has infected 101 people in the United States, causing some epidemiologists to speculate that the virus might well have been here for weeks, even as CDC officials limited diagnostic testing only to those who traveled to China and their close contacts who showed respiratory symptoms of the virus.
Following the positive test for the Solano County patient, the first coronavirus case of unknown origin in the nation, CDC officials changed criteria for testing to include any individuals with pneumonia or other severe acute lower respiratory disease that has no other explanation.
Worldwide, more than 90,000 cases have been confirmed and more than 3,000 have died. the mortality rate The New England Journal of Medicine has reported a mortality rate of 1.4 percent, but early reports out of Wuhan, China, put death rates at 2 percent. As scientists learn more about COVID-19, the mortality rate will become clear.
Coronavirus can cause coughing, shortness of breath and fever. While 80 percent of people have no symptoms or mild symptoms, others can develop pneumonia. Globally, three to four out of every 100 people confirmed to have the illness have died.
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 2:29 PM.
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