New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report

[beijingwalker]

New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report
By Dom Calicchio | Fox News

Two separate studies show that the coronavirus outbreak in the New York City area – by far the most deadly in the U.S. – originated from Europe, not China, according to a report.

Researchers conducting one of the studies have detected seven separate lineages of viruses that have arrived in the New York City area and they expect to find more, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The two studies are being conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the New York University School of Medicine.

Despite examining different examples of the outbreak, researchers from both teams reached largely the same conclusions about its origins, the Times reported.

“The majority is clearly European,” Dr. Harm van Bakel, a geneticist and co-author of the Icahn School’s study, told the newspaper.

Travelers likely carrying the virus had already been arriving in New York from Europe before Jan. 31, when President Trump limited entry by foreign nationals who’d been in China and March 11, when the president announced plans to block travelers from most parts of Europe, the Times reported.

On March 19, the newspaper reported that travelers arriving from Europe – where outbreaks in Italy and Spain were severe – were being asked at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport only if they had been to China or Iran, not if they had visited the hardest-hit nations in Europe.

“People were just oblivious,” Dr. Adriana Heguy of the NYU research team told the Times.

Researchers need to track the history of the virus so they will be able to develop vaccines and modify them as the virus mutates into other forms, the report said.

As of late Wednesday, the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, had infected 1.5 million people worldwide and killed nearly 88,000 people.

In the U.S., the virus had infected more than 420,000 people and killed more than 14,300.

In New York City, the virus had infected nearly 82,000 people (more than 19 percent of all U.S. cases) and killed more than 6,200 (nearly 44 percent of all U.S. deaths).

https://www.foxnews.com/science/new...iginated-primarily-in-europe-not-china-report

 

[beijingwalker]

Most Australian coronavirus cases coming from USA: Scott Morrison
By Nick Pearson
10:56am Mar 20, 2020
The United States is the country of origin for most of the coronavirus cases in Australia, the prime minister has said.

Speaking on 2GB this morning, Scott Morrison said now was the right time to close the nation's borders.

"We were able to slow the virus' start and spread in Australia through these early periods," Mr Morrison said.

"The country which has actually been responsible for a large amount of these (coronavirus cases) has actually been the United States.

"At the end of the day, that's a function of the number of people who travel between the US and Australia."
Eighty per cent of coronavirus cases in Australia are people who have come in from overseas or have caught the disease directly from them.

Scott Morrison said most Australian coronavirus cases are connected to the United States. (AAP)

A failure to conduct adequate numbers of coronavirus tests meant the United States appeared to have many more infections in recent weeks than had been announced.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/c...morrison/5b04121e-a597-4aaf-a1a7-04be02f9d376

 

[beijingwalker]

From zero to hero: Italy's Chinese help beat coronavirus

Silvia Ognibene
APRIL 1, 2020 / 6:13 AM /

FLORENCE (Reuters) - In the storm of infection and death sweeping Italy, one big community stands out to health officials as remarkably unscathed — the 50,000 ethnic Chinese who live in the town of Prato.

Two months ago, the country’s Chinese residents were the target of what Amnesty International described as shameful discrimination, the butt of insults and violent attack by people who feared they would spread the coronavirus through Italy.

But in the Tuscan town of Prato, home to Italy’s biggest single Chinese community, the opposite has been true. Once scapegoats, they are now held up by authorities as a model for early, strict adoption of infection-control measures.

“We Italians feared that the Chinese of Prato were to be the problem. Instead, they did much better than us,” said Renzo Berti, top state health official for the area, which includes Florence.

“Among Chinese resident in Prato there isn’t even one case of COVID contagion,” he said, referring to COVID-19, which has killed almost 12,000 people in Italy, more than in any other country.

Ethnic Chinese make up about a quarter of Prato’s population, but Berti credits them with bringing down the entire town’s infection rate to almost half the Italian average — 62 cases per 100,000 inhabitants versus 115 for the country.

Prato’s Chinese community, built originally around the textile industry, went into lockdown from the end of January, three weeks before Italy’s first recorded infection.

Many were returning from new year holidays in China, the then epicenter.

They knew what was coming and spread the word: stay home.

So as Italians headed to the ski slopes and crowded into cafes and bars as normal, the Chinese inhabitants of Prato had seemingly disappeared. Its streets, still festooned with Chinese New Year decorations, were semi-deserted, shops shuttered.

There is some anecdotal evidence that Chinese people elsewhere in Italy took similar precautions, though national data on infection rates among the community is unavailable. The health ministry did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Milan restaurateur Francesco Wu, a representative of Italian business lobby Confcommercio, said he urged Italian counterparts in February to shut down their businesses, as he had done.

“Most of them looked at me like a Cassandra,” he said. “No one could believe it was happening here ... Now Troy is burning and we are all locked inside.”

‘ITALIAN FRIENDS LOOKED AT ME ODDLY’
When Chinese-born businessman Luca Zhou flew home from China on Feb. 4 to rejoin his wife and 28-year-old son in Prato, he put himself straight into quarantine in his bedroom for 14 days, separated from his wife and son.

“We had seen what was happening in China and we were afraid for ourselves, our families and our friends,” said the 56-year-old, who has a business exporting Italian wine to China.

After emerging from his self-quarantine, he ventured outside in mask and gloves. He said the few other Chinese on the streets also wore them, anxious not to spread the virus to others.

“My Italian friends looked at me oddly. I tried many times to explain to them that they should wear them ... but they didn’t understand,” Luca said.

“When I came back to Prato, no Italian authority told me anything. We did it all by ourselves. If we had not done it, we would all be infected, Chinese and Italians.”

Italy was one of the first nations to cut air links with China, on Jan. 31, though many of its Chinese residents found their way home via third countries. On Feb. 8, almost a month before closing all schools, it offered students returning from holidays in China the right to stop attending classes.

“In Prato, there was a boom in take-up,” said local health director Berti, saying families had been obliged to contact his authority if they wanted to pursue this option. It was then that he began to realize how differently the Chinese were behaving.

More than 360 families, or around 1,300 people, registered as having put themselves into self-isolation and also signed up to his authority’s health surveillance scheme, which monitored symptoms remotely and communicated with them in Chinese.

As Italian infections began to take off in late February and early March, some families, many of whom retain Chinese citizenship, even began sending children to relatives in China, alarmed at the attitude and behavior of Italians around them.

Another who went into self-isolation after returning home from China was 23-year-old university student Chiara Zheng.

“I was conscious of the gravity of the situation. I felt a duty to do it for other people and those close to me.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...s-chinese-help-beat-coronavirus-idUSKBN21I3I8

 

[beijingwalker]

I guess most cases in Europe were also from US.

 

[Mista]

I guess most cases in Europe were also from US.

From the original article cited in OP from NYT:

Maciej Boni of Penn State University and his colleagues recently used this method to see where the coronavirus, designated SARS-CoV-2, came from in the first place. While conspiracy theories might falsely claim the virus was concocted in a lab, the virus’s genome makes clear that it arose in bats.

There are many kinds of coronaviruses, which infect both humans and animals. Dr. Boni and his colleagues found that the genome of the new virus contains a number of mutations in common with strains of coronaviruses that infect bats.

The most closely related coronavirus is in a Chinese horseshoe bat, the researchers found. But the new virus has gained some unique mutations since splitting off from that bat virus decades ago.

Dr. Boni said that ancestral virus probably gave rise to a number of strains that infected horseshoe bats, and perhaps sometimes other animals.

“Very likely there’s a vast unsampled diversity,” he said.

Copying mistakes aren’t the only way for new viruses to arise. Sometimes two kinds of coronaviruses will infect the same cell. Their genetic material gets mixed up in new viruses.

It’s entirely possible, Dr. Boni said, in the past 10 or 20 years, a hybrid virus arose in some horseshoe bat that was well-suited to infect humans, too. Later, that virus somehow managed to cross the species barrier.

“Once in a while, one of these viruses wins the lottery,” he said.

In January, a team of Chinese and Australian researchers published the first genome of the new virus. Since then, researchers around the world have sequenced over 3,000 more. Some are genetically identical to each other, while others carry distinctive mutations.

That’s just a tiny sampling of the full diversity of the virus. As of April 8, there were 1.5 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, and the true total is probably many millions more. But already, the genomes of the virus are revealing previously hidden outlines of its history over the past few months.

As new genomes come to light, researchers upload them to an online database called GISAID. A team of virus evolution experts are analyzing the growing collection of genomes in a project called Nextstrain. They continually update the virus family tree.

The deepest branches of the tree all belong to lineages from China. The Nextstrain team has also used the mutation rate to determine that the virus probably first moved into humans from an animal host in late 2019. On Dec. 31, China announced that doctors in Wuhan were treating dozens of cases of a mysterious new respiratory illness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html

 

[zectech]

Most Australian coronavirus cases coming from USA: Scott Morrison
By Nick Pearson
10:56am Mar 20, 2020
The United States is the country of origin for most of the coronavirus cases in Australia, the prime minister has said.

Speaking on 2GB this morning, Scott Morrison said now was the right time to close the nation's borders.

"We were able to slow the virus' start and spread in Australia through these early periods," Mr Morrison said.

"The country which has actually been responsible for a large amount of these (coronavirus cases) has actually been the United States.

"At the end of the day, that's a function of the number of people who travel between the US and Australia."
Eighty per cent of coronavirus cases in Australia are people who have come in from overseas or have caught the disease directly from them.

Scott Morrison said most Australian coronavirus cases are connected to the United States. (AAP)

A failure to conduct adequate numbers of coronavirus tests meant the United States appeared to have many more infections in recent weeks than had been announced.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/c...morrison/5b04121e-a597-4aaf-a1a7-04be02f9d376

US delayed months in not shutting down and locking down states. What a shame. They still haven't done so in infected regions.

China responded within days and shut down Wuhan.

 

[Oldman1]

US delayed months in not shutting down and locking down states. What a shame. They still haven't done so in infected regions.

China responded within days and shut down Wuhan.

Biggest mistake was shutting down flights from China but not watching the virus spreading from China to Europe which by the way people are traveling from Europe to U.S. obviously.

 

[49savage]

US delayed months in not shutting down and locking down states. What a shame. They still haven't done so in infected regions.

China responded within days and shut down Wuhan.

Nathan Rich is very fair and unbiased. Thanks for the vid.