USA Today have done a lot of research and produced this very long, very good, in-depth article (a novella really) about the spread of the virus throughout the US. From what they have discovered, I would say that the virus established a firm foothold in the US - and in other countries - during the first 3 weeks of January.
In the earliest days of what would become a historic pandemic, the novel coronavirus had unfettered access into and throughout the United States.
Thousands of travelers came to San Francisco on a 14-hour direct flight from Wuhan, China — the origin of the virus — in just the first three weeks of January. (2,410 people)
The Chinese government shut down the flight on Jan. 23, eight days before President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel by Chinese nationals went into effect.
Other international flights continued largely unabated for the first several months of the year. (300,943 flights)
Those flights carried millions of people, an untold number of them infected, into the country from January through April.
Meanwhile, domestic airlines ferried travelers all over the nation during the same time period. (2,334,679 flights)
The movement helped seed the virus among an unsuspecting public, unaware that life as they knew it was about to be upended.
But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.
“We have it totally under control,” Trump had said the day before when asked about the single known case in the United States. “It’s one person, coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
But none of the early epidemiological research Lee was picking up from China, where the virus had killed thousands and brought life to a standstill, suggested that assessment was correct.
Lee runs a research lab at Mount Sinai’s medical school in New York City.
Lee was one of thousands of scientists throughout the world who had since December been piecing together small studies from doctors in other countries to understand the features of the virus that had emerged in Wuhan, with their clues as to how it could be stopped.
In early January, scientists from China and Australia released an initial genome sequence of the virus. It closely resembled SARS, the virus that much of the world barely dodged two decades earlier.
The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.
The novel coronavirus didn’t start in the United States, but we have made it our own.
AMERICAN VIRUS It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy
