The White House banned most air travel from China back in late January to stop the coronavirus from entering this country. But it turns out the strain of the virus that hit New York did not come directly from China, but Europe. And it began to circulate in mid-February, weeks before the first reported case. From The New York Times:
The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.
The Times adds that the virus might have been detected months ago had sufficient testing programs been in place.
Bloomberg writes: ”Researchers at NYU Langone Health said they’ve analyzed 75 samples from patients who were diagnosed with Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at New York-area hospitals last month.
”About two-thirds of the samples appear to have European origins, said Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at the medical center. The virus appears to have been imported to New York from the U.K. and several European countries, including France, Austria and the Netherlands, she said.”
