• Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, Marina Muñoz, Carolina Florez, Sergio Gomez, Angelica Rico, Lisseth Pardo, Esther C Barros, Carolina Hernández, Lourdes Delgado, Jesús E Jaimes, Luis Pérez, Aníbal A Teherán, Hala Alejel Alshammary, Ajay Obla, Zenab Khan, Jayeeta Dutta, Adriana van de Guchte, Ana S Gonzalez-Reiche, Matthew M Hernandez, Emilia Mia Sordillo, Viviana Simon, Harm van Bakel, Martin S Llewellyn, and Juan David Ramírez.
• Department of Pathology, Molecular and Cell Based Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA. Electronic address: Alberto.Paniz-mondolfi@mountsinai.org.
• Infect. Genet. Evol. 2020 Dec 1; 86: 104616.

IntroductionVenezuela 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.MethodsWe sequenced and assembled viral genomes from total RNA extracted from nasopharyngeal (NP) clinical specimens using a custom reference-based analysis pipeline. Three assemblies obtained were subjected to typing using the Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak LINeages 'Pangolin' tool. A total of 376 publicly available SARS-CoV-2 genomes from South America were obtained from the GISAID database to perform comparative genomic analyses. Additionally, the Wuhan-1 strain was used as reference.ResultsWe found that two of the SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Venezuela belonged to the B1 lineage, and the third to the B.1.13 lineage. We observed a point mutation in the Spike protein gene (D614G substitution), previously reported to be associated with increased infectivity, in all three Venezuelan genomes. Additionally, three mutations (R203K/G204R substitution) were present in the nucleocapsid (N) gene of one Venezuelan genome.ConclusionsGenomic sequencing demonstrates similarity between SARS-CoV-2 lineages from Venezuela and viruses collected from patients in bordering areas in Colombia and from Brazil, consistent with cross-border transit despite administrative measures including lockdowns. The presence of mutations associated with increased infectivity in the 3 Venezuelan genomes we report and Colombian SARS-CoV-2 genomes from neighboring borders areas may pose additional challenges for control of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the complex epidemiological landscape in Latin American countries. Public health authorities should carefully follow the progress of the pandemic and its impact on displaced populations within the region.Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier B.V.

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