American Public Media has a story that ran on its radio show The World connecting the US outbreak of Covid to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which ran from January 7-10 in Las Vegas. This rewrites the whole narrative of the disease and how it spread in the US.
A few weeks ago a few people I know described having gotten what seemed like Covid-19 long before it was “officially” here. One was in Las Vegas for New Years and was very sick by January 2. And Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County Public Health Officer, recently determined that a woman who died in San Jose on Feb. 6 had Covid-19, and hadn’t traveled overseas.
CES is a big event. It drew 170,000 people to the Convention Center this year. The consumer electronics business is largely in Asia, and a lot of Chinese companies attend. Lots of hands are shaken. It’s a perfect place for a virus. Disease transmission is common at CES; every year some get “CES flu”. This year over a hundred people from Wuhan attended. And this year’s CES flu was a lot worse than normal. The APM story interviewed a man who finally got an antibody test that shows that he had Covid-19.
The pieces are now falling into place. The disease, not yet named, was spreading in Wuhan in December. Some (probably exhibitors) carried it to Las Vegas in advance of the show. It spread around the show floor and then, after the show’s duration conveniently being incubation time, around the airport. This spread it all over the world. That’s why others I know got it elsewhere in January. Patricia Dowd, the San Jose woman who died, did not attend CES, but others from her employer, a semiconductor company, did attebd, as did thousands from Silicon Valley. Hence the early outbreak there.
Shutting the borders after the fact didn’t help. It was already here and spreading fast. And Trump knew. From the APM story:
As the conference began, news about a mysterious new virus in Wuhan was starting to emerge but there was still little publicly known about the disease. Nobody was yet reported dead, and it wasn't until the first day of CES that Chinese health officials had even put a name to the novel coronavirus.
Behind the scenes, however, U.S. officials at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a division of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had pieced together the potential seriousness of the virus, ABC News would later expose.
And as the conference was kicking off — with three of President Trump's Cabinet members and his daughter Ivanka Trump in attendance — a warning based on that research was included in the President's Daily Briefing.
But CES went on as planned, creating an ideal venue for transmission that may never be fully understood because so few Americans were tested in January.
And what about the CDC?
Two weeks after the conference ended — the typical incubation period for the virus — the CDC had collected just 60 samples across the country.
So by the end of January the CDC was doing a few tests, but Trump was playing it all down. Insiders were selling stock, while Trump’s happy talk temporarily propped up markets. And the outbreak got worse and worse. Trump tried to blame immigrants, and minimize the danger. And do nothing to stem its spread.
So the official story was a lie. It was a lie from the get-go. The most important super-spreader event was CES. The number of infected people is probably many times the official number. CES tends to attract the young; it is the old who die from Covid-19. By promoting the wrong story, the Trump regime has made matters worse.