China’s Covid Outbreak Driven by Existing Strains, Global Consortium Finds
Covid-19 patients on stretchers in the emergency ward of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University on Dec. 22.
Photographer: Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images
The Covid-19 outbreak that’s hitting China is being caused by strains of the virus that have already circled the world, with no signs yet of significant new mutations emerging, according to officials at a global consortium that’s tracking the pandemic.
Chinese authorities submitted 25 new genetic samples from Beijing, Inner Mongolia and Guangzhou taken in the past month to GISAID, a database where scientists from around the world share coronavirus sequences as a way to monitor mutations. Tiny changes, which occur naturally as the virus passes from one person to another, have allowed scientists to track how the pathogen has moved in China and provide reassurance about its direction thus far.