1. Genomic Epidemiology of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, Colombia
- Author
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Zulma M. Cucunubá, Carolina Ferro, Diana M. Walteros, Diego A. Álvarez-Díaz, Carlos Andrés Durán, Liz Stephany Villabona-Arenas, Martha Lucia Ospina-Martínez, Christian Julian Villabona-Arenas, Marcela Mercado-Reyes, Carlos Franco-Muñoz, Astrid Carolina Flórez, Nicolás D. Franco-Sierra, Franklin Prieto, Nadim J. Ajami, Susy Echeverría-Londoño, José A. Usme-Ciro, Katherine Laiton-Donato, and Medical Research Council (MRC)
- Subjects
Epidemiology ,Lineage (evolution) ,coronavirus ,lcsh:Medicine ,medicine.disease_cause ,Genome ,0302 clinical medicine ,1108 Medical Microbiology ,Phylogenomics ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Phylogeny ,Coronavirus ,Phylogenetic tree ,phylogenomics ,Genomics ,genome sequencing ,ALIGNMENT ,Infectious Diseases ,coronavirus disease ,Life Sciences & Biomedicine ,severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 ,Microbiology (medical) ,030231 tropical medicine ,Immunology ,Genome, Viral ,Biology ,Colombia ,Microbiology ,lcsh:Infectious and parasitic diseases ,1117 Public Health and Health Services ,03 medical and health sciences ,respiratory infections ,Phylogenetics ,medicine ,Humans ,lcsh:RC109-216 ,viruses ,SARS ,Science & Technology ,SARS-CoV-2 ,Research ,lcsh:R ,Outbreak ,COVID-19 ,Reproducibility of Results ,1103 Clinical Sciences ,Genomic Epidemiology of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, Colombia ,zoonoses ,Evolutionary biology - Abstract
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Colombia was first diagnosed in a traveler arriving from Italy on February 26, 2020. However, limited data are available on the origins and number of introductions of COVID-19 into the country. We sequenced the causative agent of COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), from 43 clinical samples we collected, along with another 79 genome sequences available from Colombia. We investigated the emergence and importation routes for SARS-CoV-2 into Colombia by using epidemiologic, historical air travel, and phylogenetic observations. Our study provides evidence of multiple introductions, mostly from Europe, and documents >12 lineages. Phylogenetic findings validate the lineage diversity, support multiple importation events, and demonstrate the evolutionary relationship of epidemiologically linked transmission chains. Our results reconstruct the early evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 in Colombia and highlight the advantages of genome sequencing to complement COVID-19 outbreak investigations.
- Published
- 2020