I'm tired of writing about COVID from a geneticist's point of view, so I thought I'd let a virus speak – about the pandemic's origin and future.
Arrival!
My ancestors came to the US from China in the nasal passages of a handful of airline passengers, in late 2019. A few of us descended quickly into lungs, hiding as pneumonia percolated. Some of us were forcefully ejected in droplets as our human hosts hurried through coastal US airports, riding sneezes and coughs or shot out in violent diarrhea into airport toilets, symptoms easily blamed on common colds or food poisoning. Many hapless hosts weren't sick at all, obliviously passing us to others.
In this way, my ancestors silently, stealthily, seeded the nation.
To continue reading go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.