CDC: "there could be cases where in the U.S. people die of the flu but in reality it is coronavirus"

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Erin Banco ✔@ErinBanco

!-CDC Redfield says there could be cases where this year in the U.S. people die of the flu but in reality it could be that they died from the coronavirus.

11:19 AM - Mar 11, 2020

WA state has been using swabs w/ normal flu as part of their testing of new test kits and some have been positive for coronavirus:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html

By Sheri Fink and Mike Baker

March 10, 2020

Updated 10:27 p.m. ET

<snip>

In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading?

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

</snip>

[dalton99a]

1. Trump chose the right idiot for the job

Redfield's early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial. As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.

In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was "God's judgment" against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.

[Dennis Donovan]

2. He's a total stump. So is the Surgeon General.

Frightening that we have two stumps leading the charge against this.

Heaven help us...

[GusBob]

3. That nursing home in Washington

The story is confused, but the week before they reported "official" deaths, 2 people were tested for corona virus and 2 people died from suspected cases