LOS ANGELES _ The family arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on the way home from a Mexican vacation that had been short-lived and unpleasant. They had been exhausted, the father was battling a nasty stomach bug, and even before they settled into their Cancun hotel, they got word of the sudden death of the wife's mother in their hometown: Wuhan, China.
The couple and their toddler son wanted to get back for the funeral and planned to be at LAX just long enough to switch planes. But as they passed through Tom Bradley International Terminal on Jan. 22, the father was overcome with a fever and body aches and approached a customs officer for help.
The family did not make their flight that Wednesday night and, indeed, would not return to China for more than a month. The father, Qian Lang, became the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Los Angeles and the fourth in the United States. He remained the sole patient diagnosed with the virus here for five weeks, passing most of that time in top-secret isolation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The 38-year-old salesman played an important role, not widely known until now, in a frantic race to understand the deadly new virus before it hit the United States in full force. Public health officials and researchers looked to him as a real-time, flesh-and-blood case study.
From Qian (pronounced Chee-an), they gleaned early insights into the protection of health care workers, contact tracing and treatment. He was the second virus patient in the world to take the drug remdesivir, then experimental and now a standard therapy for those seriously ill with COVID-19.
For his family, Qian's illness and recovery meant a strange and frightening sojourn in California. Though his wife and preschooler son tested negative, they stayed with him at Cedars-Sinai in the closest approximation of a domestic life infection protocols allowed: adjoining isolation suites separated by glass.
"We realized that is a huge burden on that poor woman," L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer recalled. "By herself. Didn't really speak the language. And taking care of a child full time around the clock in basically a very confined space."
Ferrer and other health professionals said medical privacy laws prevented them from identifying Qian by name or divulging details of his care. But they agreed to talk generally about his case, which has been included in half a dozen prominent research studies. In one, he is called "CA1." In another, "Patient 9."
This story is based on those published scientific papers, interviews with public health officials and clinicians, ambulance records, an airport police report that named Qian and his wife, and a February interview he gave to a Chinese news blog, Deeper Wuhan, under a pseudonym.
Qian did not respond to messages left for him on a social media account. The anonymous author of the Wuhan blog article said she reached out to him on behalf of the Los Angeles Times, but he declined an interview request.
