COVID-19 strain in Beijing outbreak may have come from Southeast Asia: Study
Is Beijing on its way to become a second Wuhan?
A new coronavirus outbreakBeijingthat has infected more than 300 people since early June couldhaveoriginated in South or SoutheastAsia, according to astudybyHarvardUniversity researchers.
According to the China Centre for DiseaseControl and Prevention, the study is based the genetic sequencing of three virus strains and it shows that thevirus found inBeijingcases is an importedstrainofCOVID-19.
7,643 samples from across the world were compared with these genes byGeorg Hahn, a research associate with the Biostatistics Department of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his team.
TheHarvardstudy waspublished on the preprint website medRxiv.org on Wednesday and still has to be peer-reviewed.
The three genomes showed the greatest resemblance to cases in EuropefromFebruary toMay, and to cases in South and SoutheastAsiafromMayto June.
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Also read:Beijing's Xinfadi market in focus after virus reportedly detected on salmon chopping boards
They were also similar to a small number of infectionsseen in China in March, suggesting thestraincouldhaveappeared first in China and then returned to the country three months later, the authors said.
"As the most recent cases in thesebranches are almost exclusivelyfromSouth(east)Asia, this could suggest that the new cases inBeijingwere re-introduced by transmissionsfromSouth(east)Asia," they wrote.
Theoutbreaktraced toBeijing's huge Xinfadi wholesale market on June 11 had infected 329 people by the end of Wednesday.
Quarantine restrictions and large-scale testing of residents began soon after the first cases were identified, and China also required all shipments of imported meat to be tested forCOVID-19before they could leave its ports.
The study comes amid the emergence of a swine flu strain with ''human pandemic potential'' found increasingly in Chinese slaughterhouses andcan grow and multiply in the cells lining human airways.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was believed tohaveoriginated in a market in the central Chinesecity of Wuhan in December last year and has now infected more than 10 million people and killed more than 500,000 worldwide.
However, some studies suggest it couldhavebeen circulating much earlier after crossing the species barrierfromhorseshoe bats native not only to southwest China, but also Laos and Myanmar.