Deadly Virus May Have Emerged a Year Earlier, Study Says
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The new coronavirus that’s killed 38 people since September may have emerged almost a year earlier than the first known case and circulated unnoticed for that time, a study showed.
The genetic sequence of a virus taken from a 73-year-old patient who died in Munich in March, together with sequences from four other patients, suggests a common ancestor halfway through 2011, researchers at the University of Bonn Medical Center in Germany, wrote in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal today. The first known case was in Jordan in April 2012.