An Update on Covid-19 Situation in Africa
A new study has found that the vast majority of coronavirus genomes from Africa are closely related to a single lineage that is different from the ones spreading in Europe and North America. The study, published in the journal Nature, analyzed over 100,000 genomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Of these genomes, only 3.8 percent belonged to lineages that have been previously identified in Europe and North America. The rest belonged to a single lineage known as 20A.EU1.
This lineage is thought to have first emerged in Africa sometime around mid-October 2020. It then rapidly spread across the continent and has now become the …