How do you differentiate influenza from covid-19? These folks probably just have the flu. I live in WA state and I had the worst case of the flu I can remember about 3 weeks ago. Did I have covid-19? No way to really know.
Perhaps you're missing the part of the article that says:
>There are also two confirmed cases associated with the nursing facility.
I'm not trying to say they definitely have it, but it's foolish to brush this aside as "probably just the flu" when they appear to have been exposed to the virus.
edit: I now see you said 3 weeks ago, so that may not be helpful.
Our "patient zero" was a dev who came into work for a day with a cough.
If you're sick, please stay home.
I have never worked at a company where one could call in sick without consequences. My last employer (which was evil) had a policy of five sick days per year, and more than two days consecutively needed a doctors note.
Also, there was recently a death from Coronavirus in Seattle, and there has been community transmission in the nearby neighborhood of Mill Creek.
So, what evidence do you have that that "these folks probably have the flu"? At best you are dismissing concerns, at worst you are making things worse by trying to convince people not to take this seriously.
So no, I don't think it's statistically more likely that ill patients around a highly contagious disease randomly picked up something else.
Statistics based on bad data (which we know is bad at this point) is analogous to guessing, and when guessing it's best to guess with the more cautious point of view. Is it still more likely, at this point in time, that a person with flu-like symptoms has flu? Probably.
Given the transmission rate from Chinese data (also bad data, but not as bad as ours), the US likely has more flu carriers than Covid-19 carriers. But how much more likely? No one knows, and no one can know, until we get a reasonable sample population tested.
Now is the time to be vigilant. I’d rather have too many people thinking they have this and self isolating/getting tested than too few.
An update, ten days later: 26 people (nearly a quarter of the 120 residents of this facility) have died in the past three weeks. Most of those who died have already positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Post-mortem tests are still pending for a handful of the earlier cases.
More than half of the surviving residents have also tested positive for coronavirus so far. Most of them are serious cases and are currently hospitalized. More than a third of the staff have COVID-19 symptoms and are awaiting test results.
And two people have confirmed cases and are currently hospitalized.
immunity to flu lasts a few years
Useless in a clinical setting, of course, but highly useful for epidemiology