The epidemic caused by the huge Xinfadi wholesale market in Beijing on June 11 has infected 329 people.
Shanghai:
A COVID-19 strain that has infected more than 300 people in Beijing since early June could have originated in South or Southeast Asia, according to a study by researchers at Harvard University.
The Beijing epidemic has raised concerns about China’s vulnerability to a “second wave” of infections. The virus found in the Beijing cases is an imported strain of COVID-19, according to the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Harvard study, published Tuesday on the preprinted website medRxiv.org and yet to be peer reviewed, took three of the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences collected in Beijing last month and compared them to 7643 samples worldwide.
The three genomes showed the closest resemblance to cases in Europe from February to May and to cases in South and Southeast Asia from May to June.
They were also similar to a small number of infections seen in China in March, suggesting that the strain may have first appeared in China and then returned to the country three months later, the authors said.
“As the most recent cases in these branches come almost exclusively from South (east) Asia, this could suggest that the new cases in Beijing have been reintroduced by transmissions from South (east) Asia,” they said. written.
The epidemic caused by the huge Xinfadi wholesale market in Beijing 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 demanded that all shipments of imported meat be tested for COVID-19 before they can leave its ports.
SARS-CoV-2 virus allegedly originated from a market in central China’s Wuhan city in December of last year and infected more than 10 million people and killed more than 500,000 worldwide .
However, some studies suggest that it could have circulated much earlier after crossing the barrier of horseshoe bat species native not only from southwest China, but also from Laos and Myanmar.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
