Wuhan-Hu-1 claimed at least 40 lives and infected at least 1300 others in China. Cases are now being reported from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Nepal, France, Australia and even as far as the US. On Jan 10 2020, while news of the first fatality was barely trickling in, the 29,903 letters constituting the viral genome from an affected individual in Wuhan had already been elucidated (even though a few corrections were made subsequently). All the viral genome sequences from affected individuals are very very close to each other. Several are identical and none has more than 5 differences (99.983% similarity). This strongly suggests that transmission into humans came from a single pointed source and happened very recently, between Sep-Dec 2019.
Check out the detail at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947
Comments
CBI teams at GenBank®, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), NCBI Virus, and BLAST continue to rapidly process and release data associated with this outbreak as it becomes available. We also have a dedicated BLAST search page for Betacoronavirus sequences that includes the outbreak data. As always, we welcome new sequence data submissions.