Coronavirus, “the first European outbreak in Germany”

Published on: 05/03/2020 16:52

“Incredibly, it seems that the first cluster” of newly registered coronavirus infections “in Germany is the direct ancestor of subsequent infections and thus led directly to part of the widespread epidemic circulating in Europe today”. This was explained on Twitter by Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who published a genetic map on his ‘Netxstrain’ website that reconstructs the family tree of Covid-19 in Europe.

“At the base of this lineage – he explains – there is the ‘patient 1’ in Bavaria who had been infected by a visiting colleague from China. This cluster was examined through the contact trace and an analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Nejm) “.

In fact, an article is published in the magazine that reconstructs the ‘history’ of the German contagion, which, moreover, was born from asymptomatic patients.