“I think we should spend this entire conversation talking about COVID-19, and what’s very likely to be coming down the pike here in Seattle,” Lynch said to his chair Matt McIlwain, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, the Seattle-based venture capital firm. At the time, Seattleites were still making arrangements for March tech conferences and spring fundraising galas people were looking ahead to attending Seattle Storm games and Patti Smith concerts and the Emerald City Comic Con, a beloved annual gathering of 100,000 superfans slated for mid-March. “ Social distancing” had not yet entered the lexicon. What this was was still a completely unfathomable proposition for most in the global metropolis of 3.5 million. “You remember where you were when you realized what this was.” “Everyone in the room at the same time got that what he was talking about was something that was going to really change our lives.” Lynch vividly recalls that day. “People became incredibly quiet and just listened,” says Lynch. Lynch describes Bedford as “very humble” and “understated,” but that morning, as the quiet computational biologist laid out his grim projections for the virus’s impact on Seattle, he held the room. Lynch had also made time on the meeting’s agenda for Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at the prestigious Seattle-based research institute who had been tracking the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 since early January. It was Feb. 25, and Lynch was just four weeks into the job as director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, so new that as he walked the halls of the Hutch that morning he struggled to find the right conference room. He had expected to talk about the fiscal year 2021 budget and maybe to get to know his team a little better. “We hope that most people do wear their masks and that people follow social distancing, but it doesn’t always occur.Tom Lynch hadn’t expected the world to change-or at least his perception of it-at his Tuesday morning leadership meeting. “Frontline workers are at higher risk - they’re in retail locations and have people facing them all the time,” Fenstersheib said. But their workers still face a bigger threat from COVID-19. With a few hundred employees at each store, the Costco infections are reflective of coronavirus’s broader community spread, Fenstersheib said.
The supermarket chain also reported other isolated cases in East San Jose, Hayward, and Pomona locations, among others. Meanwhile in Oakland, a dozen workers at Cardenas Markets in Fruitvale tested positive for coronavirus in May. Eight workers at a Trader Joe’s in San Jose tested positive for the virus earlier this month, prompting a deep-cleaning of the facility and widespread employee testing. Jill Biden tests positive again in ‘COVID rebound’ caseĮssential workers at grocery stores around the Bay Area have been hit hard by coronavirus. “We’re not done with that investigation, so that’s not the last word on it, but that’s the way it looks.” “It looks like most of these cases came through their regular day-to-day activities and getting infected outside, as opposed to getting infected inside or infecting each other,” Fenstersheib said. Per the county’s definition of a workplace cluster - three or more cases reported within two weeks - officials have launched an investigation to inspect each store and trace the patients’ contacts.
Another eight employees fell ill at the San Jose Senter Road store, plus six at a Gilroy store and four at a Mountain View location. Marty Fenstersheib, leader of the county’s testing task force. The largest cluster of cases was reported at the Sunnyvale store at 150 Lawrence Station Rd., where 13 employees tested positive last week, according to Dr. Thirty-one workers have tested positive for coronavirus across four different Santa Clara County Costco stores in recent weeks, prompting an investigation, health officials said Thursday.