By the time New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city, a hidden explosion of a disease that many still viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of spring.Hidden outbreaks were also
By the time New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city, a hidden explosion of a disease that many still viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of spring.
“Meanwhile, in the background, you have this silent chain of transmission of thousands of people,” said Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, who led the research team. “Through February 27, this country only had 14 cases,” he said during a briefing. “We did that isolation and that contact tracing, and it was very successful. But then, when the virus more exploded, it got beyond the public health capacity.”By late February, as the world’s attention shifted to a dire outbreak in Italy, those 14 known U.S. cases were a tiny fraction of the thousands of undetected infections that the researchers estimated were spreading from person to person across this country.
Some scientists cautioned that the new report’s estimates of an enormous, unseen wave of infections could be too high — even though testing surveillance lagged at the time. Vespignani’s approach models the outbreak over time based on what is known about the virus and where it has been detected. It estimates the spread of the disease by simulating the movements of individual people based on where people fly, how they move around, when they go to school and other data. By running the model under various conditions — when schools are closed, say — his team estimates where the virus may have spread undetected.
City and state officials in New York acted more slowly, waiting until known cases were at a higher level to shut down schools and issue a stay-at-home order. Mayor Bill de Blasio was reluctant to embrace shutdowns until mid-March, citing the impact they would have on vulnerable New Yorkers.
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