Authors’ response: Plenty of coronaviruses but no SARS-CoV-2

Reusken, Chantal B; Haagmans, Bart; Meijer, Adam; Corman, Victor M; Papa, Anna; Charrel, Remi; Drosten, Christian; Koopmans, Marion

To the editor: The emergence of a novel pathogen raises a wide range of urgent questions that need to be addressed to guide clinical and public health responses [1] . One of the cornerstones and a prerequisite for a proper public health and clinical response is the availability of a reliable diagnostic and reference laboratory service with adequate capacity. This is recognised in the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) and explicitly recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in their risk assessments and guidelines upon the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [2] [3] [4] [5] . Colson et al. question the proportionality of the laboratory readiness and response for this novel coronavirus in expert laboratories of Emerging Viral Diseases-Expert Laboratory Network (EVD-LabNet) and European Reference Laboratory Network for Human Influenza (ERLI-Net) in 30 European Union and European Economic Area (EU/EEA) countries, as outlined in our publication [6] . The initial response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 is a strategy of containment consisting of active case finding in combination with case isolation and quarantine of contacts [3] , a strategy for which adequate worldwide laboratory services are indispensable as seeding of the virus through travellers from China could be expected. Indeed, during the response period for our survey, the first cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were already notified in France on 24 January and as at 26 February 2020, 381 cases have been notified in Europe [6, 7] .