Gates Package — page 954

After sequencing the virus from this positive sample, one of the team members--a computational biologist named Trevor Bedford--made a disturbing discovery: Genetically, it was closely related to another, earlier case in Washington state. By comparing mutations in the genomes of the two viruses, Bedford showed that the two people had been infected roughly three to six weeks apart. It was proof of what many scientists had long suspected--that the virus had been moving throughout the state for quite some time. <~?~Insert art 017_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> When COVID arrived in Washington state. We now know COVID was spreading throughout communities undetected for several weeks before the first "non-traveler" cases were recorded. In this chart we can see the difference between confirmed cases of COVID and the estimated number of people infected in the first several weeks of 2020. (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) Then the group turned to the next logical question: Based on what they knew about the two cases they had sequenced, and how long they now knew the virus had been circulating, how many more people might be infected? A disease modeler named Michael Famulare ran the calculations and put the estimate at 570.* At the time, only eighteen COVID cases had been confirmed through testing in all of Western Washington. With this work, Bedford, Famulare, and their colleagues showed that the country's COVID testing system was utterly inadequate. In Washington state alone, hundreds of people had COVID but didn't know it, and the disease was spreading fast. * To be more precise, Famulare put the number at 570, with 90 percent confidence that it was between 80 and 1,500.