Call it the “New York City coronavirus.” In Alaska, COVID-19 didn’t originate in Seattle.
A report detailed in the New York Times says that 80 percent of the infections of COVID-19 in Alaska are from the strain of the virus that came through New York City.
It’s a different strain than the one that swept through Seattle. According to the report, no case of coronavirus in Alaska have been associated with the Washington state strain.
The coronavirus infection was so widespread in New York by early March, that the city was the primary source of new infections in many parts of the country. Thousands of travelers going to and from the city took the infections across the country before communities and states knew it was there and had started setting social distancing limits.
The findings are drawn from geneticists’ tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people, and models of the outbreak, the newspaper said.
States such as Arizona, Utah, and Idaho, also saw most of their cases come from New York City travelers. Idaho, Ohio, Iowa, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, and Massachusetts were similar to Alaska in having no cases that were part of the Seattle strain.
