From The New York Times:
Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks
New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.
The findings are drawn from geneticists’ tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts.
“We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.
During crucial weeks in March, New York’s political leaders waited to take aggressive action, even after identifying hundreds of cases, giving the virus a head start. And by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, the data suggest, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country.
Acting earlier would most likely have blunted the virus’s march across the country, researchers say.
“It means that we missed the boat early on, and the vast majority in this country is coming from domestic spread,” said Kristian Andersen, a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. “I keep hearing that it’s somebody else’s fault. That’s not true. It’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our own fault.”
Geneticists have analyzed and shared more than 2,000 samples of the virus from infected people. As the virus infects new people and replicates, it picks up mutations along the way. These mutations typically do not change the behavior of the virus, but they can provide a signature of a virus’s origin.
Most samples taken in Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Idaho, Wisconsin and many other states carry distinct mutations that can be traced back to viruses introduced into New York.
Over all, Dr. Grubaugh estimated, infections spreading from New York account for 60 to 65 percent of the sequenced viruses across the country.
So New York spread the virus to most of the rest of the United States because New York failed to lock down much earlier.
The Mayor and Governor have exacerbated the problem through every ridiculous possible policy.
They forced nursing homes to take sick patients creating elderly death centers.
They kept the subways open creating underground transmission tubes.
Then the New York based media forced the rest of us to lockdown because of New York’s mishandling.
Lastly, volunteers who traveled to New York to assist their hospitals have to pay income tax in New York from employers out of state.
When all is said and done, New York will have destroyed any and all good will it has from the rest of the country.
Next time, the rest of the US will just watch as New York burns and all we do is make sure nobody escapes to spread whatever it is to the rest of us.
Our first cases in Idaho originated in Blaine County. For those of you wondering what the hell is in Blaine County, Idaho, two words, Sun Valley. The rich NYC elites fled the cesspool of New York for their condos and “cabins” in Sun Valley and brought the WuFlu with them.
The people of NYC wonder why there is so much animosity directed their way during “The Rona”, when there was so much goodwill after 9/11.
This is why.
The people of NYC were the victims of the 9/11 attacks. We all pitched in to help the victims recover.
But NYC’s official response to coronavirus has been a string of botched incompetence, to the point that from the outside it looks like malicious indifference to their own people, and by extension (due to travel) to the rest of the country.
Really, suppose for the sake of argument, they were trying to facilitate the spread of the virus to maximize casualties in those first few weeks. What would they have done differently? What would they be doing differently now?
And then, even after the nation poured out their support and sent volunteers and equipment to help them out, Cuomo and de Blasio had the nerve to appear on national television and insult everyone outside NY, criticizing our responses and telling us exactly how we’re hurting the people of NY. My own state sent several hundred ventilators that could have been needed here, so I for one am feeling really f@#king unappreciated.
They’re not the victims here. They might have been at the beginning, but then they aided and abetted the enemy. That enemy may be a microbe, but they did everything they could to downplay, facilitate, and spread it far and wide.
They brought this pandemic on themselves through inaction, passed it on to everyone else the same way, and then expected us to save them. (What’s the unofficial definition of “chutzpah”, again?)
No. No more. F@#k ’em.