SARS-CoV-2 spread across the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Venezuela and Colombia both adopted measures of containment early in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Venezuela's ongoing humanitarian crisis has decimated its health care system, and forced millions of Venezuelans to flee through its porous border with Colombia. The extensive shared border, and illegal cross-border transit through improvised trails between the two countries are major challenges for public health authorities. We report the first SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Venezuela, and present a snapshot of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemiologic landscape in the Colombian-Venezuelan border region.

Methods

We sequenced and assembled viral genomes from total RNA extracted from nasopharyngeal (NP) clinical specimens using a custom reference-based analysis pipeline.

SUBMITTER: Paniz-Mondolfi A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7609240 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature