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

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

Technological advancements and the wide-spread adoption of WGS in pathogen genomics have transformed public health and infectious disease outbreak responses [13] . 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. As seen with the recent West African Ebola [14] and Zika virus epidemics [15] , rapid WGS significantly increases resolution of diagnosis and surveillance thereby strengthening links between clinical and epidemiological data [16] . This advance improves our understanding of pathogen origins and spread that ultimately lead to stronger and more timely intervention and control measures [17] . Following the first release of the SARS-CoV-2 genome [18] , public health and research laboratories worldwide have rapidly shared sequences on public data repositories such as GISAID [19] (n = 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 [20] .