Guangdong Lufeng announced the epidemic situation. How was its source infected?

At the press conference of Guangdong Provincial People's Government on epidemic prevention and control, the director of the Provincial Health and Wellness Committee said that the tracing results of Lufeng epidemic virus were highly homologous to the strains prevalent in Hong Kong.

After the Lufeng epidemic, the Guangdong Provincial Health and Wellness Commission, together with the Provincial Public Security Department, Shenzhen City, Shanwei City and the provincial (municipal) CDC, carried out the work of tracing the source of the virus and found out the transmission context. For the first time, the whole genome of the virus was sequenced. Nasopharyngeal swab samples from 5 infected cases were collected, and the whole genome of the virus was sequenced and analyzed for three generations. It was found that the viral gene sequences of these five cases were highly homologous.

Compared with nearly 80,000 COVID-19 genome sequences in the global database, it was found that these five cases belonged to HK 1 which was prevalent in Hong Kong, and they were highly homologous to the virus sequences of Hong Kong epidemic strains, with a homology percentage of 99.99%.