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Global Genomic Surveillance of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus
James Richard Otieno, Ahmed Mohammed Albarraq, Francis Amirtharaj Selvaraj, Amna Omair Al Mehairi, Esam Ibraheem Azhar, Christopher Ruis, Hasan Zackaria Ali Ishaq, Asma Abi Mohamed Shah, Zelalem Tadesse, Qiu Yu, Ihab El Masry, Hala Abou El Naja, Belinda L. Herring, Amal Barakat, Maria Van Kerkhove, Sophie von Dobschuetz, and Lorenzo Subissi
Author affiliation: World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland (J.R. Otieno, M. Van Kerkhove, S. von Dobschuetz, L. Subissi); Public Health Authority, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (A.M. Albarraq); PureLab, Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (F.A. Selvaraj, A.O. Al Mehairi); Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi (F.A. Selvaraj); King Fahd Medical Research Center and Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (E.I. Azhar); University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (C. Ruis); Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, Abu Dhabi (H.Z.A. Ishaq, A.A.M. Shah); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy (Z. Tadesse, Q. Yu, I. El Masry); World Health Organization, Cairo, Egypt (H.A. El Naja, A. Barakat); World Health Organization, Manila, the Philippines (B.L. Herring).
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Figure 1
Figure 1. Breakdown of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus sequences detected by country, host, and clade by year during global genomic surveillance, 2012–2025. A) Number of publicly available curated genome sequences by country and year of sampling. B) The proportion of sequences by host. C) Proportion of sequences by clade. The red star for United Arab Emirates in 2015 denotes a single clade A sequence. Available sequences by year: 2012, n = 8; 2013, n = 69; 2014, n = 115; 2015, n = 320; 2016, n = 75; 2017, n = 86; 2018, n = 20; 2019, n = 32; 2020, n = 1; 2021, n = 3; 2022, n = 7; 2023, n = 35; 2024, n = 15; 2025, n = 2. The total number of available sequences is shown in parentheses for each country in the y-axis. Countries are colored by World Health Organization region: gold, Africa Region; magenta, Region of the Americas; green, Eastern Mediterranean Region; black, European Region; blue, South-East Asia Region; red, Western Pacific Region.
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