[peter422]

The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.

In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.

So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.

[inciampati]

We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.

[tim333]

This suggests outside Wuhan, perhaps to the south https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)