Having carefully read this, I'm not sure I would have green-lit this piece to run.

I'm not sure the words "mainly from Europe" conveys enough accuracy. I'm not sure a layman is going to interpret this in a way that is substantively true.

Let me explain /1 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1248071228520304641

The data that the researchers are using comes from here.

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global 

Here's a map of phylogeny (the evolutionary history) of the virus

Note that all "paths" of this virus lead back to China. That is not in any way under dispute by anyone. /2

There are a couple of key mutations here. There is this one that I believe was the first US case that we saw in Seattle. It came directly from China.

Cases from this strain ended up in Washington, California, a few in NY. /3

Then we've got this strain which branched in Belgium. The top section of red represents many of the cases from NY (and some in WI and CA) and came through France /4

But there are a ton of missing pieces because we can only map what we sequence and places with better sequencing capabilities are going to show up with clusters.

For example: Where is Iran on this map? Well, we don't have a Iranian samples sequenced so we have to infer. /5

We know that one of the early NY sequences came from someone with a travel history to Iran, but it seems like maybe that branch died off. /6 https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1239427201499426816

Anyway, that's what I know. I worry a lot about what people will think is true and the conclusions they draw about things they just barely understand (I'm included in that group).

I'm not sure a evolutionary deep-dive on COVID genetics is something I'd put "Breaking News" on. /7

It sounds like something that maybe, as a news org, you decide is a little more complex than a "Breaking News" headline would warrant and maybe the details are best left to the experts and readers who care enough to search it out /8