Scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have mapped the origin and spread of the coronavirus since the initial outbreaks in the city. New York later became the main infectious focus in the United States, but the virus, according to the investigation, arrived from Europe and other parts of the country. The genomic precision of the study allows interesting conclusions to be drawn about the effectiveness of international flight restrictions and other anti-pandemic measures.
Viral genomes isolated from 84 patients in the first half of March dazzlingly reveal that the virus (SARS-CoV-2, in the jargon, causing the disease covid-19) entered the city several times, and from various sources . The first New York case was detected on February 29, despite the fact that a month earlier the federal government had restricted flights from China. Those from Europe were not banned until mid-March. That’s where the coronavirus entered New York, and surely in the rest of the country. While Donald Trump was protecting himself from the “Chinese virus”, as he likes to say, it turns out that the Chinese virus came to him from Europe, the UK and Ireland.
Since the flight restriction, infections have been local, and Mount Sinai researchers have detected two clusters of cases (or viral genomes) that strongly indicate community transmission somewhere in the city. It is a pattern that Chinese scientists have already detected: the virus reaches a new city by travelers who come from affected areas, but the subsequent explosion of cases is due to local contagion. This is, in fact, the great argument to impose measures of social distancing, which are much more tiring than the simple and traditional locking of airports.
Viviana Simon, Harm van Bakel and 25 colleagues from Mount Sinai publish their research in Science. Large cities are hyperconnected nodes with the rest of the world, and are therefore the ones that carry the most ballots to receive a virus from any affected area. That is the reason that Madrid and Barcelona have taken the jackpot of the epidemic in Spain, and that they are the last in line in the de-escalation process. Once the virus has reached these dense population centers, however, it is local transmission that does most of the work. Let’s imagine that a member of the Belgian royal family travels to Córdoba to participate in an illegal party of 27 people. Let’s imagine that the Belgian is a carrier of the virus. It is not necessary to imagine it, because it just happened, and we already have 27 people in quarantine to prevent a re-outbreak in the Andalusian city. They also got on a plane to Barajas and an AVE to Córdoba, hopefully respecting the distance measures, or 500 more people would have to be confined. Much genome and little neuron.
You can follow Matter in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or subscribe here to our newsletter.
–
