The coronavirus is washing over the U.S. These factors will determine how bad it gets in each community
On March 15, the governor of Washington called the Seattle area the “hotbed of this outbreak.”
“Code Red,” blared the tabloid cover of the New York Post eight days later.
And this weekend, the Tampa Bay Times forecast that Florida, where the governor has not imposed statewide stay-at-home measures, would “see tens of thousands of infections in the coming weeks” from the coronavirus pandemic.
Two months after the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the United States, the virus has sprung from its initial toeholds and started to shift the country’s infection map — from one of pockmarked hotspots to one that blankets the entire nation. Detroit. New Orleans. Dallas. These are among the cities that could be the next hubs of the U.S. emergency, and where the virus has likely been spreading for weeks.
As the outbreak rolls across the country, residents are asking: Who will be hit next? And how fast and how hard?
“It’s very feasible we’re going to see multiple city- or state-level outbreaks across the country in the next few weeks and months,” said Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. “They will start at different times and they will peak at different times.”
Experts told STAT that a host of factors are at play: demographics like
