Allison Black, Louise H Moncla, Katherine Laiton-Donato, Lissethe Pardo, Angelica Rico, Catalina Tovar, Diana P Rojas, Ira M Longini, M Elizabeth Halloran, Dioselina Peláez-Carvajal, Juan D Ramírez, Marcela Mercado-Reyes, Trevor Bedford
bioRxiv
October 29, 2018
ABSTRACT
Colombia was the second most affected country during the American Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemic, with over 109,000 reported cases. Despite the scale of the outbreak, limited genomic sequence data were available from Colombia. We sequenced ZIKV genomes from Colombian clinical diagnostic samples and infected Aedes aegypti samples across the temporal and geographic breadth of the epidemic. Phylogeographic analysis of these genomes, along with other publicly-available ZIKV genomes from the Americas, indicates at least two separate introductions of ZIKV to Colombia, one of which was previously unrecognized. We estimate the timing of each introduction to Colombia, finding that ZIKV was introduced and circulated cryptically for 5 to 7 months prior to ZIKV confirmation in September 2015. These findings underscore the utility of genomic epidemiological studies for understanding epidemiologic dynamics, especially when many infections are asymptomatic