Covid-19 could flood New York from Europe

Many new studies published in the US show that nCoV was transmitted to New York City by passengers from Europe, raising questions about the approach of US President Donald Trump’s administration during the early stages of the pandemic.

Scientists at the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University, USA, said one of the first people infected with nCoV here may have been infected indirectly from a passenger returning from the UK.

President Trump in late January banned foreigners from entering the US if they had been to China in the previous 14 days, but only applied the same measure to passengers from Europe nearly two months later.

Medical staff take the body of a Covid-19 patient to a refrigerated truck in New York on April 9.

The research team points to a case on Long Island who tested positive for nCoV in early March, despite never having traveled abroad.

`In addition to England and Italy, nCoV also seems to have entered New York from France, Austria and the Netherlands,` said Dr. Adriana Heguy, a research team member at the Grossman School of Medicine.

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai Hospital, USA, also published research showing that nCoV had been spreading in New York City since mid-February, weeks before officials recorded the first positive case.

`The people who brought nCoV to New York did not come from Asia. The majority clearly came from Europe,` said genetic expert Harm van Bakel, study co-author.

Scientists believe that officials could have detected cases of nCoV infection from Europe if more tests had been conducted.

China announced dozens of cases of `strange respiratory disease` in Wuhan at the end of December 2019.

The US initially only tested people who returned from China after January 15, 2020 and had symptoms of Covid-19.

Passengers landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York confirmed this.

Pam Mundus, who returned from the Italian capital Rome on March 1, said no one asked her about the trip or the risk of nCoV infection.

The first positive case of nCoV was recorded in New York on March 1, the number of patients flocking to hospitals skyrocketed in the following weeks.

The Icahn School of Medicine research team analyzed 84 nCoV genomes taken from 800 patients, said it was impossible to determine the flight that brought nCoV to New York, but confirmed that there was `a phase of global spread that was not detected from

Dr. Viviana Simon said that only one of the 78 positive cases in the study was related to the nCoV strain in Asia and it was closely related to people infected in Seattle, Washington state, where patient 0 became infected.

New York state is currently the epicenter of the US epidemic with nearly 160,000 people infected with nCoV, more than 7,000 people dead, accounting for nearly half of the total deaths across the US.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio yesterday warned that community isolation measures could be tightened and extended until June to contain and prevent the epidemic from re-erupting while it is trending downward.