COVID-19 Records

Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.134 [SLACK_000348] · slack_pm:msg:01373

Page text: p.134 · original PDF

Date
2020-08-14 14:25
Type
chat message · slack
recipient
Kristian G. Andersen, Robert F. Garry, Andrew Rambaut
speaker
Edward C. Holmes

Recipients on this medium are inferred from channel membership, not per-message addressing.

Are we sure that the NextStrain tree is just massively subsampled, missing key background lineages?

In context

A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.

  1. 2020-08-14 14:22 Edward C. Holmes open
    The story here is that the outbreak in Victoria was due to an escape from hotel quarantine from return travellers.There's even an inquiry going on that the moment. I can see from the tree that you are suggesting that the virus wasin Australia prior to the current outbreak? That is certainly not the narrative here. I will need to ask about this. Toclarify, I'm not involved in any of the Australian analysis: it's being done by the public health people in each state. They've shut me out completely.
  2. 2020-08-14 14:25 Edward C. Holmes
    Are we sure that the NextStrain tree is just massively subsampled, missing key background lineages?
  3. 2020-08-14 14:25 Kristian G. Andersen open
    Yeah, that's what I thought too - returning travelers and quarantine issues. I should have clarified that the statementI shared is from the most recent Nextstrain narrative: https://nextstrain.org/narratives/ncov/sit-rep/2020-08-14.I'm not sure we can really conclude it's local acquired from this data, but I haven't looked at it directly (so I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with the Nextstrain folks here...)
  4. 2020-08-14 14:26 Kristian G. Andersen open
    And yes - my concern exactly relates to whether subsampling has taken out necessary context - combined with bias,of course.
  5. 2020-08-14 14:27 Edward C. Holmes open
    I'm going to ask around about this. At face value it's either a massive fuck-up by the people analysing the data or it'sirresponsible subsampling from NextStrain.
  6. 2020-08-14 14:27 Kristian G. Andersen open
    Whether correct or not, pretty interesting though - especially given the pretty strong political line that this is due toreturn travelers (could be - but I'm also not sure about that...).

Full conversation →