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Surveillance: Nextstrain

Use the Nextstrain website to see a real-time, open-access snapshot of evolving pathogen populations including SARS-Cov2.
Sequencing of pathogenic genomes can be used to track the spread of an outbreak across the world.

The Nextstrain website provides an open access real-time snapshot of evolving pathogen populations and allows interactive data visualization for virologists, epidemiologists, public health officials and citizen scientists.

The phylogenetic tree below shows the evolution of COVID-19 over time and around the world. Strain A is the ancestral genotype most closely resembling the bat coronavirus genome from which the human COVID-19 originated. Through the acquisition of mutations, strain A then evolved into a strain A subset (now predominant in the USA and Australia) from which strain B (predominant in China) and then strain C (predominant in Western Europe) has evolved. In late 2020 we detected a new substrain that arose in the South East of the UK, creating another peak of cases.

Nextstrain screenshot as described in the text

You can look at the Nextstrain website and have a play with the tools available: SARS-Cov2 on Nexstrain

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Genomic Scenarios in Primary Care

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