An emergent clade of SARS-CoV-2 linked to returned travellers from Iran

Eden, John-Sebastian; Rockett, Rebecca; Carter, Ian; Rahman, Hossinur; de Ligt, Joep; Hadfield, James; Storey, Matthew; Ren, Xiaoyun; Tulloch, Rachel; Basile, Kerri; Wells, Jessica; Byun, Roy; Gilroy, Nicky; O’Sullivan, Matthew V; Sintchenko, Vitali; Chen, Sharon C; Maddocks, Susan; Sorrell, Tania C; Holmes, Edward C; Dwyer, Dominic E; Kok, Jen

Technological advancements and the widespread adoption of WGS in pathogen genomics have transformed public health and infectious disease outbreak responses (Popovich and Snitkin 2017) . Previously, disease investigations often relied on the targeted sequencing of a small locus to identify genotypes and infer patterns of spread along with epidemiological data (Dudas and Bedford 2019) . As seen with the recent West African Ebola (Dudas et al. 2017) and Zika virus epidemics (Grubaugh et al. 2018) , rapid WGS significantly increases resolution of diagnosis and surveillance thereby strengthening links between genomic, clinical, and epidemiological data (Grenfell 2004) , and potentially uncovering outbreaks in unsampled locations (Grubaugh et al. 2019b ). This advance improves our understanding of pathogen origins and spread that ultimately lead to stronger and more timely intervention and control measures (Grubaugh et al. 2019c) . Following the first release of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (Wu et al. 2020) , public health and research laboratories worldwide have rapidly shared sequences on public data repositories such as GISAID (Shu and McCauley 2017) (n ¼ 236 genomes as of 9 March 2020) that have been used to provide near real-time snapshots of global diversity through public analytic and visualization tools (Hadfield et al. 2018) .