The first cases and deaths in the USA were in the place where we live in King County east of Seattle directly attributable to the half million Chinese people living here many of whom visit home often and have frequent visitors. We had scary predictions about what was going to happen here after University of Washington researchers discovered early on that we had community spread weeks before the first cases were discovered.
A couple local hospitals had overwhelmed ICUs when the virus hit some local nursing homes, but just before the governor's “stay at home” order went into effect nearly a month ago the hospitals started clearing out and the deaths slowed to a trickle. This is fairly common with respiratory illness epidemics, once the most vulnerable people die, the deaths trickle off quickly.
The fire department that I retired from recently tested every member. 11 were found to be positive, only 1 had any symptoms, and his were so benign that he thought he was just having issues from our extremely high pollen count this year, and still coming to work.
In our area we were the first in the nation to have issues and the peak was over three weeks ago. The deaths since that time have mostly been “presumptive” by CDC guidelines. ie... My brother-in-law had an inoperable cancerous brain tumor; he was being cared for by hospice workers and his family. His cause of death was “respiratory failure”, so by CDC guidelines he was counted as a “presumptive Covid-19 death. Everyone knows this is BS, but when I mentioned this to my neighbors... they couldn't get away from me fast enough. But this is happening all across the country. And the huge increase in testing is making it look like we have a growing number of cases ere even though our number of people actually sick is declining.
Interesting post—good to have some WA inside info.
Thanks.