Kári Stefánsson

And since we sequence every single sample that tests positive, and we have sequenced now 380 viruses, whereas the rest of the world has sequenced, all the rest of the world has sequenced 1,000.

We can place the virus in every single infected individual in Iceland in the context of geographic origin.

There's a haplotype that associates with Austria, another with Italy, a third with England, a fourth with the West Coast of the United States, etc.

So we can pretty much trace where this has come into the country and subsequently

we can also use this to track the infection in Iceland.

We can determine who is infected from whom.

But what we have been generating are data that address this question, how many individuals are infected in the population, which is necessary to be able to calculate out the death rate.

And it is the big question, is this disease very lethal?

or is this disease all over the place and therefore not very lethal?

And I think that what we are seeing, first and foremost, is that the disease caused by the virus has a very, very broad spectrum when it comes to severity.

There are those who go through this as a common cold, and some even describe this as mild cold, and then there are those who become deadly sick.

And sort of the data we have, you know, are not yet particularly good data to address the question of lethality because we are so early in the epidemic in Iceland.

We are sending out a manuscript today and we are gonna deposit our data in the public databases today.

So we are indeed hoping that this will

be useful for the rest of the world.

It will be useful for people to model the disease.

And there is no one else who has been doing screening of people not suspected of having the disease.

So I think we have a valuable contribution here.