The Wuhan Coronavirus

[Mister Obvious]

The team at the @seattleflustudy have sequenced the genome the #COVID19 community case reported yesterday from Snohomish County, WA, and have posted the sequence publicly to http://gisaid.org. There are some enormous implications here.

This case, WA2, is on a branch in the evolutionary tree that descends directly from WA1, the first reported case in the USA sampled Jan 19, also from Snohomish County, viewable here: https://nextstrain.org/ncov?f_division=Washington

I'd assess the p-value for this coincidence at 2/59=0.03 and so is statistically significant. Additionally, these two cases are geographically proximal, both residing in Snohomish County. 5/9

I believe we're facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China. 6/9

We will be working closely with @KCPubHealth and @WADeptHealth to investigate the full extent of the outbreak. 7/9

We're hoping to update soon with better estimates of the number of infections in Washington State using available data. 8/9

Thank you to the @seattleflustudy team, and particularly to @lea_starita, for exceptionally fast turnaround from diagnostic assay at @WADeptHealth to sequenced genome. 9/9

An update, because I see people overly speculating on total outbreak size. Our best current expectation is a few hundred current infections. Expect more analyses tomorrow.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1233970746126266368