PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pekar, Jonathan
AU  - Worobey, Michael
AU  - Moshiri, Niema
AU  - Scheffler, Konrad
AU  - Wertheim, Joel O.
TI  - Timing the SARS-CoV-2 Index Case in Hubei Province
AID  - 10.1101/2020.11.20.392126
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.11.20.392126
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/24/2020.11.20.392126.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/24/2020.11.20.392126.full
AB  - Understanding when SARS-CoV-2 emerged is critical to evaluating our current approach to monitoring novel zoonotic pathogens and understanding the failure of early containment and mitigation efforts for COVID-19. We employed a coalescent framework to combine retrospective molecular clock inference with forward epidemiological simulations to determine how long SARS-CoV-2 could have circulated prior to the time of the most recent common ancestor. Our results define the period between mid-October and mid-November 2019 as the plausible interval when the first case of SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Hubei province. By characterizing the likely dynamics of the virus before it was discovered, we show that over two-thirds of SARS-CoV-2-like zoonotic events would be self-limited, dying out without igniting a pandemic. Our findings highlight the shortcomings of zoonosis surveillance approaches for detecting highly contagious pathogens with moderate mortality rates.Competing Interest StatementJOW has received funding from Gilead Sciences, LLC (completed) and the CDC (ongoing) via grants and contracts to his institution unrelated to this research.