The Coronavirus Outbreak Was Quietly Spreading Across The U.S. Earlier Than Initially Thought

By March 1, when New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus, the virus had already begun quietly spreading through the city, according to a model of the spread by researchers at Northeastern University.  Long before testing would indicate signs of an outbreak, the virus had already reached cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle, the New York Times reports.

As early as February, while many thought that the virus was primarily a China problem, the virus was likely spreading in multiple American cities. During that time, the government had only just begun talks of whether or not the outbreak would become serious enough to order quarantine measures. Unfortunately, during this critical time, little or no testing for the virus was taking place.

“Meanwhile, in the background, you have this silent chain of transmission of thousands of people,” said Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, who led the research team.

Vespigani’s research provides the first clear depiction of how far behind the United States has been in detecting and acting on the virus.

Last week the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that health officials were successful in tracking the first known cases and their contacts in the United States before the outbreak got this far out of hand.

“Through February 27, this country only had 14 cases,” Dr. Robert R. Redfield said during a briefing. “We did that isolation and that contact tracing, and it was very successful. But then, when the virus more exploded, it got beyond the public health capacity.”

Unfortunately, by the end of February, those 14 known American cases were a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of undetected infections that the researchers estimated were spreading from person to person across this country.

“Knowing the number of flights coming into New York from Italy, it was like watching a horrible train wreck in slow motion,” said Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Another research team led by Dr. Heguy’s team and another at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai also discovered that the seeds of most infections in New York came from multiple locations in Europe, rather than directly from China, which was what many assumed, especially Donald Trump who inappropriately referred to the disease as “The Chinese Virus.”

“We weren’t testing, and if you’re not testing, you don’t know,” Dr. Heguy said. These new estimates that suggest thousands of infections were spreading silently in the first months of the year “don’t seem surprising at all,” she went on to say.