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

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.

Continue reading “Looking at the Data” →

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?

Continue reading “The Genetic Evolutionary Tree of the US COVID Outbreak” →