The 1st COVID-19 Death in the U.S. Occurred on February 6th

Until today it was believed the first known COVID-19 death in the United States occurred on February 29th at a nursing home outside Seattle.

However, it is now known the first COVID-19 death in the United States occurred more than three weeks earlier. According to autopsies conducted by the medical examiner in Santa Clara County in California, the first COVID-19 death occurred on February 6th. A second death occurred 11 days later.

The first person who succumbed died at home and had not been diagnosed with COVID-19. At the time, testing was only being carried out by the CDC and limited to people with a particular travel history (i.e. China) and had specific symptoms.

Of course, this means there are going to be a lot of post-mortems and a great many of those post-mortems will list COVID-19 as the cause of death. Thus it is entirely possible the first COVID-19 death occurred before February 6th. Americans were dying and the Trump Administration fiddled. As of this writing 47,486 Americans have died of COVID-19. Sadly, we can be sure this total will be much higher.