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