FILE – In this March 28, 2020, file photo, Los Angeles police officers patrol a sparsely populated Venice Beach boardwalk in Los Angeles. At least three police officers in California have died so far from COVID-19 and officers have been urged to wear masks when they are interacting with the public. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

Earlier today, it was reported that the first deaths from Wuhan virus in California took place in early February. This is from my colleague Jennifer van Laar’s post on the news story from earlier today:

Officials in Santa Clara County, California announced Tuesday that the county’s first coronavirus death occurred on February 6, more than a month before previously thought. Prior to the announcement it was believed that the first Wuhan flu death in the United States occurred in Washington State on February 29. The determination was made after tissue samples taken during autopsy were tested by the Centers for Disease Control.

County officials believe that individual’s infection, along with those of two individuals who died February 17 and March 6, originated within the community. Until the autopsy tissue results were received, county health officials believed that the first coronavirus death in Santa Clara occurred on March 9.

This is a huge development in what we know about Wuhan virus and a metaphor for the bill of goods we, as a nation, have been sold about this pandemic. Let’s go to former New York Times reporter, best selling novelist, and out Wuhan skeptic Alex Berenson:

2/ Of note, the first known arrival of #COVID in the US has been dated to Jan. 15 in Seattle, and until now the first known death also occurred in Seattle – on Feb. 29 – more than three weeks after this death, on Feb. 6.

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 22, 2020

3/ So this is yet more evidence #SARSCoV2 has been present for longer and spread wider in the US than previously understood (because the replication cycle is so short and the transmission rate so high, even two weeks could make a 5-15x difference in the number of infections).

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 22, 2020

Significantly, both the dead people are believed to have contracted the virus from ‘community’ exposure, that is, they were not travelers to China or on a cruise ship. Assuming the person who died first was sick for at least two weeks (typically it takes 5 days for symptoms to show and assuming that the illness progressed normally) before dying at home (this also hints that they didn’t perceive themselves, and weren’t perceived by anyone else, to be sick enough to call 911), they acquired the disease in mid-January. This finding dovetails with the extraordinary levels of exposure to Wuhan noted in Santa Clara and Los Angeles Counties. It also gives credence to the suspicion that the heavy ‘flu season’ was, in fact, Wuhan already present in the US in force in December.

What it also means is that California has had a total of 1,300 fatalities attributed to Wuhan.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the entire Wuhan lockdown is a grotesque overreaction to a virus that isn’t particularly deadly or virulent. It is becoming equally obvious the models driving this are utter nonsense and the people pushing those models are knowing or, worse, unknowing frauds.