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The new coronavirus spread across much of the interior of the United States by tagging along with people moving from state to state, but US coastal regions were seeded with SARS-CoV-2 imported from other countries — perhaps in 2019, according to models. Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues studied air traffic, commuting patterns and other data to understand how and when the coronavirus took hold in the United States (J. T. Davis et al. Preprint at medRxiv http://doi.org/d3mf; 2020). The team found that in several coastal states, international travel drove introduction of the virus. In California and New York, SARS-CoV-2 might have begun circulating as early as December 2019.
But in many non-coastal states, domestic travelers rather than international visitors were the source of the first wave of infections. Infections spread across the country from late January to early March but were largely undetected, the authors say. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.
Preprint of original study available at medRxiv (July 7, 2020):
