Thread by @NathanGrubaugh

I was misquoted in the NYT for having said that "infections spreading from New York account for 60 to 65 percent of the cases across the country."

I DID NOT SAY THAT

It's now causing these spinoff stories with this in the headlines.

businessinsider.com/travel-from-ne…

The interview was initially about my teams work finding that our sequenced #SARSCoV2 genomes from Connecticut fit into mostly 2 clades - one related to genomes from WA and one related to NY. To better visualize this data, I took them to Nextstrain.

From there I showed the reporters that most of the sequenced viruses from the US were related to those sequenced from NY, suggesting that a lot of domestic spread has happened from there. Which is true, and probably not surprising given the travel in and out of NY.

I estimated, while looking that the tree, that 60-65% of the sequenced genomes in the US (actually, a bit more) fit within the A2a clade that includes those from NY and Europe. You can see it here:
nextstrain.org/ncov/north-ame…

I also said that there are many sampling biases so we don't know what is happening in many other parts of the country. You can see that here:

So did a lot of domestic #SARSCoV2 spread come from NY? Yes. But not all of it is directly from NY (other stops along the way) and there was also spread from other locations.

In no way does this tell us what % of cases are directly tied to the outbreak in New York.

And this is not NY's fault! Pandemic viruses, as we are seeing, are hard to control. We need strong, swift, and unified measures across the country to control outbreaks and spread. Stopping the outbreak in NY alone would not have stopped the epidemic in the rest of the country.

While I want to promote open science communication and the public should know what we know, experiences like this make me not want to work some journalists. Unless you want to talk directly about the work by our team, I will be taking a break from interviews for a while. /Fin