SARS-CoV-2 historical global testing and genomic variability

Abstract

The world has been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic since December 2019 and a lot of effort has focused on tracking the spread of the virus by gathering information regarding testing statistics and generating viral genomic sequences. Unfortunately, there is neither a single comprehensive resource with global historical testing data nor a centralized database with summary statistics of the identified genomic variants.We merged different pre-aggregated historical testing data and complemented them with our manually extracted ones, which consist of 6852 historical test statistics from 76 countries/states unreported in any other dataset, at the date of submission, making our dataset the most comprehensive to date. We also analyzed all publicly deposited SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences in GISAID and annotated their variants. Both datasets can be accessed through our interactive dashboard which also provides important insights on different outbreak trends across countries and states.The dashboard is available at https://bioinfo.lau.edu.lb/gkhazen/covid19. A daily updated version of the datasets can be downloaded from github.com/KhazenLab/covid19-data.