A year ago today (January 20), authorities identified the first case of COVID-19 in the United States. Since then, the country has recorded more than 24.2 million cases and more than 400,000 people have died of the virus.
The first known case in the U.S. involved a 35-year-old man who traveled to Wuhan, China, to visit his family and returned to Washington state on January 15, according to The New England Journal of Medicine. Four days after returning, he went to an emergency clinic in Snohomish County with a cough and what appeared to be a fever. The clinic and the Washington Department of Health collected samples and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the CDC confirmed that he had COVID-19 a day later, on January 20th.
Although it is the first known case of COVID-19 in the United States, a study suggested that the new coronavirus could have arrived in the country as early as December, Live Science previously reported. By the end of April, the United States had reached 1 million cases of COVID-19 and, on November 9, the United States registered 10 million cases.
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The first known COVID-19-related death in the U.S. was a 57-year-old woman who died at home in Santa Clara County, California, on February 6, 2020, Live Science previously reported.
On May 27, COVID-19 killed 100,000 people in the United States. Four months later, on September 22, the death count reached 200,000. In mid-December, 300,000 people died of the virus and in just over a month, 100,000 people died, bringing the country’s total to more than 400,000 COVID-19-related deaths, according to The Johns Hopkins panel.
One year since the first officially reported COVID-19 case, the United States faces skyrocketing case counts, a relentless death count and a mutating virus. Scientists developed vaccines in record time, but state and local authorities have struggled to put these vaccines in the arms, with only about 15.7 million registered doses administered to people, according to the CDC.
Today (January 20) is also the day President-elect Joe Biden will take office. Many expect it to fix the confusing response from the US COVID-19. Biden has a goal of delivering 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the US population in his first 100 days in office, which Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says is possible. according to Reuters.
“The viability of his goal is absolutely clear,” said Fauci on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program on January 17. “There is no doubt about it, it can be done.”
Originally published on Live Science.