Sauce: Eurosurveillance

What is Eurosurveillance? Eurosurveillance is published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Stockholm, Sweden. Eurosurveillance is a European peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to the epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control of communicable diseases, with a focus on such topics that are of relevance to Europe. It is a weekly online journal, with 50 issues per year published on Thursdays, and features short rapid communications, longer in-depth research articles, surveillance and outbreak reports, reviews and perspective papers, as well as short news items.

Link to paper: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.3.2000045 (it's open access so read it for free !)

Title: **Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR **

Publication date: 23 January 2020

Authors: Corman et al. (24 authors in total from 6 countries and 9 different institutions)

First author (he is a German Virologist) research pedigree: almost 20000 citations as seen in https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=-GKkDt0AAAAJ

Take away point: "In the present case of 2019-nCoV, virus isolates or samples from infected patients have so far not become available to the international public health community."

Take away point 2 : "The present report describes the establishment of a diagnostic workflow for detection of an emerging virus in the absence of physical sources of viral genomic nucleic acid. Effective assay design was enabled by the willingness of scientists from China to share genome information before formal publication, as well as the availability of broad sequence knowledge from ca 15 years of investigation of SARS-related viruses in animal reservoirs."

TLDR summary: there is as of 23 January 2020 absence of physical evidence of the 2019 novel Coronavirus. China lied and the rest is speculative filling of the genome gaps