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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...
Armed with much more genomic information amassed in the ensuing months, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona and his colleagues simulated 1,000 different viral evolution scenarios to see if any would connect WA1 to the Washington infections six weeks later. Yet the models didn’t spit out the later infections’ viral sequences. “[W]e failed to observe a single simulated epidemic that has the characteristics of the real phylogeny,” the authors write in their report.
“In all likelihood this didn’t start with WA1,” Worobey tells STAT. “It started with some unidentified person who arrived in Washington state at some later point. And we don’t know from where.” Bedford agrees with the conclusions of Worobey’s team, he tweeted on May 25.
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The new study also examined the likely origins of Europe’s first outbreaks, concluding that a cluster of cases in Germany did not seed the pandemic in Italy. Instead, the data point to both countries’ outbreaks starting independently by travelers coming from China, and then transmission of the virus from Italy to New York in late February.
Worobey and his authors note that because undetected cases in Washington were unlikely between mid-January and mid-February, the US missed opportunities for testing and contact tracing to prevent an outbreak.
“Our finding that the virus associated with the first known transmission network in the US did not enter the country until mid-February is sobering,” the authors write, “since it demonstrates that the window of opportunity to block sustained transmission of the virus stretched all the way until that point.”
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