Researchers find patients with COVID-19 in Bay Area, Grand Princess cruise ship had multiple strains of coronavirus
The San Francisco Chronicle (6/8, Said, 2.67M) reports patients with COVID-19 in the Bay Area as well as on the Grand Princess cruise ship “had strains of the coronavirus that originated in locations from China to Europe, underscoring the global nature of the virus and the fact that California might have been able to stop its spread with earlier interventions.” Researchers at the University of California San Francisco “sequenced the genomes of 36 patients from nine northern California counties and the Grand Princess,” and published a paper in Science magazine that “provides a detailed look at how coronavirus came to California.” Lead researcher Dr. Charles Chiu said, “There was a window of opportunity in February and March where if we did have the ability to do more widespread testing and contact tracing, we could have quelled the outbreak or prevented the outbreak from blowing up.”
Contagion Live (JUN 08, 2020 | GRANT M. GALLAGHER) Authors reported that relevant cases spanned 9 counties in Northern California. There were 11 samples collected from the Grand Princess cruise ship, 3 samples from a Solano County cluster that included the first reported case of community transmission in the US with subsequent spread to 2 health care workers, 7 samples from Santa Clara County from a local outbreak cluster associated with workspace transmission, 3 samples from patients who contracted the infection from a sick contacts, 5 samples related to domestic or international travel, and 7 samples from additional cases of community transmission. Sequencing and contextualization with other publicly accessible genomes showed that viral strains included lineages circulating in New York and Europe which are related to early lineages from China.
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