Back in January, the “novel coronavirus” that had sprung up in the Chinese city of Wuhan was at most a distant worry for many people in the United States.
But SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was already circulating in major U.S. cities, according to Alessandro Vespignani, Sternberg Family distinguished university professor, who directs Northeastern’s Network Science Institute. And if we want to keep our communities safe going forward, we need to understand how we missed a virus that was right under our noses.
“We don’t want to fall into this trap in the future,” Vespignani says.
The discovery that the virus was already circulating in the U.S. in January comes from a model that Vespignani and his colleagues have been using to study and predict the global spread of the virus. The model relies on human mobility and patterns of interaction, as well as the infection dynamics of the virus.
Read more at Northeastern Global News
AP Photo by John Minchillo
