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Two separate teams of researchers tracing the coronavirus outbreak in the States have concluded that the virus originated in travellers from Europe, not China, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Studies found that the virus was entering the country via flights to New York from Europe, weeks before Trump implemented a ban on travellers from China on January 31. By the time he stopped travel from Europe in mid-March, thousands of people were already infected.

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“People were just oblivious,” Adriana Heguy, who worked with a team at the N.Y.U Grossman School of Medicine, told the New York Times.

The NY.U. team, as well as a team at Mount Sinai hospital, New York, analyzed two different groups of genomes of the coronavirus taken from infected New Yorkers in mid-March. according to the Times. Through tracing the mutations within the genomes via compute testing, they were able to estimate how long the virus lived and track it back to its ancestors.