Calif. May Have Coronavirus Herd Immunity, Stanford Fellow Says
STANFORD, CA – The new coronavirus may not be as new as was previously thought.
That’s according to Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and conservative political columnist who questions the accuracy of the COVID-19 outbreak timeline accepted by most as fact.
Hanson thinks the outbreak likely started much sooner than late December of last year, when China says the outbreak began in Wuhan, and that Californians developed some degree of herd immunity through earlier exposure the virus than the rest of the country.
New York State, the epicenter of the outbreak, has reported 32 times as many deaths per 100,000 residents as California according to CNN’s latest tally as of Wednesday morning.
California has experienced 507 COVID-19-related fatalities in a state of 40 million that’s roughly double the population of New York, which has reported 6,268 known coronavirus-related deaths.
"Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet," Hanson said Wednesday in an interview with KSBW 8, an NBC news affiliate in Salinas.
Hanson believes that a consistent influx of Chinese nationals visiting the Golden State – 8,000 a day by his estimation, including some arriving on direct flights from Wuhan– through California airports brought the coronavirus to the West Coast before it was identified as COVID-19.
He points to reports of an early flu season last year that he believes may have been the coronavirus, then unbeknownst to doctors.
Hanson has no background in epidemiology or biological science according to his bio page, which notes his areas of expertise are in history, international conflict and military strategy.
"When you add it all up it would be naïve to think that California did not have some exposure," Hanson told KSBW 8.
Stanford Medicine is conducting a study that may back up his assertion.
Stanford researchers took blood samples from approximately 3,200 volunteers in Santa Clara County on Friday and Saturday according to The Stanford Daily.
The test will show whether someone has been infected with the virus, including those who experienced mild or no symptoms, Stanford Associate Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid told The Stanford Daily.
"It's hard to stand up in this epidemic and say, 'Look, we really don't know if this epidemic is impending Armageddon,'" Bendavid said. "In order to know and reduce that uncertainty, you need numbers."
Hanson believes the numbers could show that more Californians have been exposed to the virus than was previously known.
“One less-mentioned hypothesis is that California, as a front-line state, may have rather rapidly developed a greater level of herd immunity than other states, given that hints, anecdotes, and some official indications from both China and Italy that, again, the virus may well have been spreading abroad far earlier than the first recorded case in the U.S. —and likely from the coasts inward,” he wrote in a March 31 National Review column.
“So given the state’s unprecedented direct air access to China, and given its large expatriate and tourist Chinese communities, especially in its huge denser metropolitan corridors in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it could be that what thousands of Californians experienced as an unusually “early” and “bad” flu season might have also reflected an early coronavirus epidemic, suggesting that many more Californians per capita than in other states may have acquired immunity to the virus.”
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This article originally appeared on the Palo Alto Patch
