The New York Times, April 8, 2020
New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.
“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.
A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.
Continue reading “Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show”
The New York Times, April 3, 2020 (with Jonathan Corum)
Greetings from lockdown.
Four weeks ago, I wrote in shock about 100,000 cases of Covid-19 around the world. As of today, there are 691,867. The United States has overtaken China as the nation with the most cases (125,313), and the exponential curves in states across the country foretell many, many more cases to come. So far, 2,201 people have died of Covid-19. More will die. How many is in part up to us. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, March 29, 2020”
The New York Times, March 24, 2020
In January, Chinese virologists isolated the virus that causes Covid-19. Earlier this month, a team of virologists gave this new virus a new name: SARS-CoV-2.
To do so, they had to move the virus to the head of a very, very long line.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that the world of virus diversity — what they sometimes call the virosphere — is unimaginably vast. They have uncovered hundreds of thousands of new species that have yet to be named. And they suspect that there are millions, perhaps even trillions, of species waiting to be found.