Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States.

Jennifer L Harcourt ,Xiaoyan Lu,Haibin Wang,Thomas G Ksiazek,Steven G Widen,Natalie J Thornburg,Jessica A Plante,Clinton R Paden,Janna Murray,Shifaq Kamili,Craig Schindewolf,Krishna Narayanan,Kenneth S Plante,Krista Queen,Yan Li,Stephen Lindstrom,Dionna Scharton,Rashi Gautam,Anna Uehara,Divya Mirchandani,Shinji Makino,Scott C Weaver,Vineet D Menachery,Ying Tao,Kumari G Lokugamage,Lijuan Wang,Azaibi Tamin,Suxiang Tong,Brett Whitaker,Brian Lynch,Jing Zhang,Cynthia S Goldsmith ,Senthil Kumar K Sakthivel ,Hannah Bullock

doi:10.3201/eid2606.200516

Abstract

The etiologic agent of an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, was identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in January 2020. A patient in the United States was given a diagnosis of infection with this virus by the state of Washington and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on January 20, 2020. We isolated virus from nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal specimens from this patient and characterized the viral sequence, replication properties, and cell culture tropism. We found that the virus replicates to high titer in Vero-CCL81 cells and Vero E6 cells in the absence of trypsin. We also deposited the virus into 2 virus repositories, making it broadly available to the public health and research communities. We hope that open access to this reagent will expedite development of medical countermeasures.

Highlights

The etiologic agent of an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, was identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in January 2020
The public health community requires viral lysates to serve as diagnostic references, and the research community needs virus isolates to test antiviral compounds, develop new vaccines, and perform basic research
We describe isolation of SARS-CoV-2 from a patient who had coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the United States and described its genomic sequence and replication characteristics

Summary

Introduction

The etiologic agent of an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, was identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in January 2020. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been identified as the source of a pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 [1,2]. Initial characterization of SARSCoV-2 spike indicates that it binds the same receptor as SARS-CoV angiotensin-converting enzyme, which is expressed in both upper and lower human respiratory tracts [8]. We describe isolation of SARS-CoV-2 from a patient who had coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the United States and described its genomic sequence and replication characteristics. We have made the virus isolate available to the public health community by depositing it into 2 virus reagent repositories

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Results

Conclusion