APM Reports:

The timing of CES and the people who attended could be more clues, or “ecologic evidence,” about how the virus spread in Silicon Valley at a time when people weren’t paying attention, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert and professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.

“As a clinician, it was weird to be in the Bay Area to see Santa Clara County being the hotspot,” he said. “You would think it would be San Francisco because there’s tons of people going into [the airport] and a lot of Chinese population, but I think there has to be something else to this.” It will take more research to determine whether CES is that connection, he said.

The conference, a well-known schmooze-fest of tech leaders from around the world, created an ideal environment for a virus to spread, particularly if highly infectious people were present. People jam into convention halls and casinos, share business cards, shake hands and socialize in close quarters with attendees from tech hubs across the United States — largely New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Southern California — and at least 63 other countries.

I speculated about this months ago. After all, for those of us who used to attend Macworld Expo, the “Expo Creeping Crud” is a well known “disease.” Almost invariably after attending, many of us would come down with a low grade flu.

This is just one more reason to not go to CES.