Member-only story
Pandemic
Coronavirus: How Did It Get to the West?
Combining virus genomics with epidemiologic simulations and travel records offers some clues.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
In late 2019 we saw the emergency of SARS-CoV-2 (the cause of COVID019), setting off a global pandemic linked to more than 900,000 deaths globally. Following the initial outbreak in China’s Hubei province, the virus spread worldwide, prompting isolation, contract tracing, and travel restrictions.
I live in the Seattle area, the site of the first outbreak in the United States. Indeed, I work at the hospital that had the first significant outbreak in the USA. A traveler had returned from the disease epicenter (Wuhan, China) on January 15, 2020.
Now comes a new and exciting study that combines genomics from coronavirus with detailed travel records and computer simulations of epidemics. Researchers aim to reconstruct, in sufficient detail, the spread of the virus across the globe. How did the pandemic develop in space in time?
