First US coronavirus patient leaves hospital

A 35-year-old Seattle-area man who was reportedly the first patient diagnosed with the coronavirus in the US has left the hospital after receiving treatment.

The Associated Press reported Monday that the unidentified man wished to remain anonymous but thanked his doctors and nurses upon leaving Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He fell ill a few days after arriving back in the US after visiting China.

The patient took himself to an urgent care clinic on Jan 19 before being transferred to a special isolation room at the hospital the next day.

On Jan 31, an article on the first US case was published by The New England Journal of Medicine that detailed the patient’s symptoms as well as medications and treatment that had been used.

The local, state and federal health experts who authored the article said they hoped it would help others worldwide in treating the virus.

Somkiat Lalitwongsa, the director of the Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, told Bloomberg on Monday that a cocktail of antiviral drugs appeared effective in treating a seriously ill patient infected with the virus. Thailand has 19 confirmed cases of the virus: 11 patients are still hospitalized, and the rest have returned home.

The HIV medicine Kaletra was used on three patients along with the antiflu medication Tamiflu. Kaletra is already being studied in a randomized, controlled trial in coronavirus patients in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began, but no drugs have been approved to treat the disease.

“There’s not enough evidence to support the effectiveness just yet,” said Somkiat. “But we report to contribute to the medical community globally. The results look good so far.”

According to the CDC, coronavirus has been confirmed in nearly 30 countries including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and Vietnam. Only about 150 people have tested positive for the disease outside China.

As of Sunday, 11 people across the US have been confirmed to have the virus. Nine of them became ill after returning from trips to Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus. The two others were human-to-human transmission between a husband and wife.

Besides the man in Washington state, six cases have been reported in California, two in Illinois and one each in Arizona and Massachusetts.

Despite its arrival stateside, both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state officials say the threat from coronavirus remains low at this time.

“Remember, you are much more likely to become sick with the cold or flu than to be diagnosed with coronavirus,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine.

Since October, there have been more than 45,000 diagnosed cases of flu and 33 deaths in Pennsylvania alone.