Some new and very interesting information from the Bedford Lab in Washington State. I’ve mentioned Bedford’s work a few times. He runs a research lab at the Fred Hutchinson Center where he studies viral genomes. It was his work that initially revealed that in late February that COVID19 had been spreading in Washington state for some six weeks. He just posted another Twitter thread in which he says there is now a critical mass of genomic sequencing data from different parts of the United States and the world that allows us to construct a preliminary map of how the disease spread across the United States.
Was there a single patient zero from whom the US epidemic originated or were there multiple separate introductions from different parts of the world? Or what was the mix of the two?
Let me share with you some graphs of the COVID19 outbreak in New York, across the United States and then their relationship to each other.
When I posted my COVID19 turning points one of mine – and one that many TPM Readers shared – was listening to New York Times science and health reporter Donald McNeil on The Daily podcast on February 27th clearly comparing COVID to the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic in which “not everybody died, but everybody knew somebody who died.”
Here is McNeil talking to Christiane Amanpour about the federal response to the epidemic. There’s no new fact you won’t know. Or not many. But he puts the whole picture together with great concision.
Donald G. McNeil Jr: The CDC “is a great agency but it’s incompetently led, and I think Dr Redfield should resign.” pic.twitter.com/7tUPDGsE86
— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) May 12, 2020
White House senior adviser and son-in-law to the President Jared Kushner is walking back his outrageous suggestion about pushing back the presidential election.
As he should.
I am generally skeptical of arguments that COVID19 will permanently change the way we socialize, work, travel, seek out entertainment. If anything I think that once there is a vaccine for COVID (the creation of a viable vaccine is not a given but I assume it for these purposes) that people will return to many of these activities with a renewed gusto. The exceptions – and they may be very big ones – are those cases where people decide that new ways of operating are more efficient, cost effective or simply better. This may particularly affect how we work.
As I noted below, we are now getting sufficiently dense data on the genetic lineages of COVID19 to map its introduction and spread within the United States – both in time and geography. The preliminary evidence suggests the epidemic in New York City began after COVID was introduced from Europe in mid-February. Perhaps there were isolated introductions earlier. Given the scale of international travel in and out of the city it seems hard to imagine there wasn’t. But it was this mid-February introduction that took root and exploded, ultimately infecting more than 1.5 million city residents and killing at least 20,000 people. Now that this virological, genomic history is coming into clearer view it is time to consider an alternative history of the epidemic, one in which the US fielded tests two or three weeks before the point of introduction to what would become the epicenter of the US epidemic.
Federal judge in Mike Flynn case appoints retired judge to brief him on whether Flynn should be held in criminal contempt for perjury.
FBI agents executed a search warrant Wednesday night at the Washington, DC-area home of Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), the LA Times reports. They reportedly seized Burr’s cell phone as part of their investigation of stock trades he made while getting COVID-19 briefings as chairman of the Senate intel committee. The stock trades occurred before the full scope of the pandemic threat was publicly known in the United States.
You’ve really got to see what’s been going on at The Federalist during the pandemic. It’s the leading progenitor of the “there are things worse than death” approach to defending Trump’s COVID-19 debacle. Matt Shuham did the heavy lifting of sifting through its coverage so you don’t have to. Must read.
The retired judge appointed to be friend of the court in the Mike Flynn case has already been on the record publicly expressing concern about the circumstances of the Justice Department’s unprecedented reversal.
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