The emergence, genomic diversity and global spread of SARS-CoV-2
The emergence, genomic diversity and global spread of SARS-CoV-2
Since the first cases of COVID-19 were documented in Wuhan, China in 2019, the world has witnessed a devastating global pandemic, with more than 238 million cases, nearly 5 million fatalities and the daily number of people infected increasing rapidly. Here we describe the currently available data on the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, outline the early viral spread in Wuhan and its transmission patterns in China and across the rest of the world, and highlight how genomic surveillance, together with other data such as those on human mobility, has helped to trace the spread and genetic variation of the virus and has also comprised a key element for the control of the pandemic. We pay particular attention to characterizing and describing the international spread of the major variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2 that were first identified in late 2020 and demonstrate that virus evolution has entered a new phase. More broadly, we highlight our currently limited understanding of coronavirus diversity in nature, the rapid spread of the virus and its variants in such an increasingly connected world, the reduced protection of vaccines, and the urgent need for coordinated global surveillance using genomic techniques. In summary, we provide important information for the prevention and control of both the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and any new diseases that will inevitably emerge in the human population in future generations.
408-418
Li, Juan
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Lai, Shengjie
b57a5fe8-cfb6-4fa7-b414-a98bb891b001
Gao, George F.
45097a33-ef07-4f93-8662-72d2563c09b2
Shi, Weifeng
26b5180c-60a4-408f-8838-99b1bba67dd6
8 December 2021
Li, Juan
b9aca3b9-8f20-432b-bc84-7da07f23e3c7
Lai, Shengjie
b57a5fe8-cfb6-4fa7-b414-a98bb891b001
Gao, George F.
45097a33-ef07-4f93-8662-72d2563c09b2
Shi, Weifeng
26b5180c-60a4-408f-8838-99b1bba67dd6
Li, Juan, Lai, Shengjie, Gao, George F. and Shi, Weifeng
(2021)
The emergence, genomic diversity and global spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Nature, 600 (7889), .
(doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04188-6).
Abstract
Since the first cases of COVID-19 were documented in Wuhan, China in 2019, the world has witnessed a devastating global pandemic, with more than 238 million cases, nearly 5 million fatalities and the daily number of people infected increasing rapidly. Here we describe the currently available data on the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, outline the early viral spread in Wuhan and its transmission patterns in China and across the rest of the world, and highlight how genomic surveillance, together with other data such as those on human mobility, has helped to trace the spread and genetic variation of the virus and has also comprised a key element for the control of the pandemic. We pay particular attention to characterizing and describing the international spread of the major variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2 that were first identified in late 2020 and demonstrate that virus evolution has entered a new phase. More broadly, we highlight our currently limited understanding of coronavirus diversity in nature, the rapid spread of the virus and its variants in such an increasingly connected world, the reduced protection of vaccines, and the urgent need for coordinated global surveillance using genomic techniques. In summary, we provide important information for the prevention and control of both the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and any new diseases that will inevitably emerge in the human population in future generations.
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Submitted date: 28 January 2021
Accepted/In Press date: 26 October 2021
e-pub ahead of print date: 8 December 2021
Published date: 8 December 2021
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Acknowledgements We acknowledge the efforts of the World Health Organization in sharing the COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update, the researchers that are part of the cov-lineages. org team (https://cov-lineages.org/) in assembling the records for new strains, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) for collating the COVID-19 case data (github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19), and Google for producing and sharing the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (www.google.com/covid19/mobility/). We thank the researchers who generated and shared the sequencing data from the GISAID and NCBI GenBank databases; T. Hu, P. Wang, X. Yao and H. Song for helping to produce the figures; and E. C. Holmes, A. Tatem and J. Floyd for commenting on the manuscript. This work was supported by Key Research and Development Project of Shandong province (grant nos. 2020SFXGFY01 and 2020SFXGFY08), the National Key Research and Development Programme of China (grant no. 2020YFC0840800), the National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant no. 2018ZX10101004-002 and 2016ZX10004222-009), the National Natural Science Fund of China (81773498), the Academic Promotion Programme of Shandong First Medical University (2019QL006), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (INV-024911). W.S. was supported by the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province (ts201511056).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 452823
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/452823
ISSN: 1476-4687
PURE UUID: 6f120cca-2019-4bf2-99e9-5c407aa06119
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Date deposited: 21 Dec 2021 17:49
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:52
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Author:
Juan Li
Author:
George F. Gao
Author:
Weifeng Shi
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