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Good morning.

I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily 202 for Monday, March 2nd.

In today's news, Joe Biden moves to capitalize on his win in South Carolina.

Pete Buda Judge drops out.

And Thomas Jefferson's hometown

won't celebrate his birthday.

Instead, it will mark the end of slavery.

But first, the big idea.

The coronavirus has been circulating undetected and has possibly infected scores of people over the past six weeks in Washington State.

That's according to a genetic analysis of virus samples that has sobering implications for the entire country amid heightening anxiety about the likely spread of the disease.

Researchers conducted genetic sequencing of two virus samples. One is from a patient

who traveled from China to Snohomish County in mid-January and was the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States.

The other came from a recently diagnosed patient in the same county, a high school student who

hadn't traveled outside the state and had no known exposure to the coronavirus.

The two samples look almost identical genetically.

According to Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

He believes we're facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that wasn't detected until now due to the narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China to get screened.

Officials in Seattle and King County on Sunday announced that four more people have tested positive for the coronavirus, including the second person in the state to die.

That brings the outbreak in Washington State to 13 cases.

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