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An outbreak of coronavirus infections in Washington State that began at the end of February was likely sparked by a traveler who entered the state in mid-February, rather than by an infected person who flew from Wuhan, China, to Seattle in mid-January, as was previously thought. That’s the conclusion of a preprint posted on bioRxiv May 23 that modeled various transmission scenarios based on the genomes of viral samples collected from patients in Washington State and elsewhere.
The study confirms “a lot of what we were starting to suspect from the epidemiological data, that there were some early introductions in the West Coast that did not spark sustained transmission,” Northeastern University’s Samuel Scarpino, who was not involved in the work, tells STAT.
Initial studies by Trevor Bedford, who studies pathogen evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington, indicated that the ...
