Travel from New York City seeded outbreaks all over the United States before city officials instituted social distancing guidelines, new research shows.
Geneticists tracked mutations of the virus, where infected people traveled, and models of outbreaks across the country, to find that more infections nationwide came from the viral outbreak in New York City, according to the New York Times.
While the outbreak on the West Coast, starting in Washington, spurred more outbreaks in California and Oregon, the virus that originated in New York propagated even more infections in coastal states, other western states, midwestern states, and southern states.
Waiting to institute travel restrictions and social distancing guidelines in the city fueled the outbreaks in Louisiana, Arizona, Texas, and other states. Acting earlier, geneticists said, could have blunted the virus’s force.
“It means that we missed the boat early on, and the vast majority in this country is coming from domestic spread,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. “I keep hearing that it’s somebody else’s fault. That’s not true. It’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our own fault.”
New York officials waited to take action until after hundreds of cases cropped up in the city, and it wasn’t until March 24 that the White House Coronavirus Task Force advised recent travelers from New York City to self-quarantine. Four days later, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo issued an executive order mandating that all travelers into the state from New York City must self-quarantine for two weeks.
However, the data shows that the virus had already spread so widely that neither statewide quarantine measures nor President Trump’s ban on travel from Europe instituted on March 11 made much of a difference.
The findings suggest that states beginning to loosen restrictions and lift lockdowns will affect other states and their recovery from the virus. As the virus travels from person to person, it replicates and mutates. However, geneticists can still trace the virus’s origin. Most samples from infected people in Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Idaho, Wisconsin, and other states contain mutations that can be traced back to the viral outbreak in New York City earlier this year.
“New York acted as the Grand Central Station for this virus, with the opportunity to move from there in so many directions, to so many places,” said David Engelthaler, infectious disease expert at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona.
The U.S. currently has over 1.25 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and more than 75,500 people have died.
A crippling budget deficit looms over California, a coronavirus hot spot, which has fallen into the deepest economic hole in the state’s history.
California’s government faces a $54.3 billion budget deficit through next summer, according to a budget analysis released Thursday by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s advisors. It’s the largest budget hole in the state’s history, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Current tax revenues, the budget experts said, are expected to fall short by about $9.7 billion. Much of the state’s funding has gone toward propping up the public health and hospital systems as well as human services programs, which caused an economic collapse in a matter of weeks.
Newsom said Wednesday that the state’s economic recovery will take much longer than expected, as Californians now have to contend with deeper income losses than during the Great Recession.
Altogether, states and cities face pandemic-related shortfalls of about $500 billion. House Democrats are seeking to pass legislation to have the federal government make up the difference. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, has said that any aid to states and cities must be directly related to the effects of the virus and not address longer-running fiscal problems due to mismanagement.
The White House reportedly shelved a set of detailed guidelines for reopening put forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for being “overly prescriptive” and for potentially hindering the administration’s efforts to reopen the country.
“Issuing overly specific instructions, that CDC leadership never cleared, for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances states are experiencing throughout the country,” a coronavirus task force official told NBC News.
In the past seven weeks, as most of the country shuttered businesses to limit the spread of the virus, 33 million people have filed for new unemployment benefits, a labor-market development without precedent. Forecasters expect that the April jobs report, due Friday morning, will show that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been since the Great Depression.
Neiman Marcus filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, making it the biggest retailer to fail since the coronavirus devastated the U.S. economy. The company is “facing unprecedented disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has placed inexorable pressure on our business,” said CEO Geoffroy Van Raemdonck. He said he expected the company to emerge from bankruptcy in the fall.
Over two-thirds of people in the U.S. say their greatest concern is that state governments will lift restrictions too quickly, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center. Only 31% say their greater concern is that states will not lift them quickly enough. Forty-eight percent of people say that the restrictions in their area are about right, with 27% saying that there should be more restrictions and 24% saying there should be fewer.
The virus has come very close to Trump in recent days: The White House said Thursday that one of his personal valet drivers tested positive. A spokesman said, though, that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have since tested negative for the virus.
