Coast-to-coast spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States revealed by genomic epidemiology

Joseph R Fauver; Mary E. Petrone; Emma B Hodcroft; Kayoko Shioda; Hanna Y Ehrlich; Alexander G. Watts; Chantal B.F. Vogels; Anderson F. Brito; Tara Alpert; Anthony Muyombwe; Jafar Razeq; Randy Downing; Nagarjuna R. Cheemarla; Anne L Wyllie; Chaney C. Kalinich; Isabel Ott; Josh Quick; Nicholas J. Loman; Karla M. Neugebauer; Alexander L. Greninger; Keith R. Jerome; Pavitra Roychoundhury; Hong Xie; Lasata Shrestha; Meei-Li Huang; Virginia E. Pitzer; Akiko Iwasaki; Saad B. Omer; Kamran Khan; Isaac Bogoch; Richard A. Martinello; Ellen F. Foxman; Marie-Louise Landry; Richard A Neher; Albert I Ko; Nathan D. Grubaugh

We first estimated daily passenger volumes arriving in the region from the five countries (China, Italy, Iran, Spain, and Germany) and out-of-region states (Washington, California, Florida, Illinois, and Louisiana) that have reported the most COVID-19 cases to date ( Figure 2A -D ). To this end, we collected passenger volumes arriving in three major airports in southern New England: Bradley International Airport (BDL; Hartford, Connecticut), General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport (BOS; Boston, Massachusetts), and John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK; New York, New York; Figure 2B ). As travel data for 2020 are not yet available, we calculated the total passenger volume from each origin and destination pair between January and March, 2019, and estimated the number of daily passengers. We found that the daily domestic passenger volumes were~100 times greater than international in Hartford,~10 times greater in Boston, and~4 times greater in New York in our dataset ( Figure 2B ).