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. 2020 Dec 20:11:100185.
doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100185. Epub 2020 Oct 20.

"One health" inspired SARS-CoV-2 surveillance: The Galapagos Islands experience

Byron Freire-Paspuel  1 , Patricio Vega-Mariño  2 , Alberto Velez  2 , Paulina Castillo  2 , Carlos Masaquiza  2 , Ronald Cedeño-Vega  3 , Tannya Lozada  1 , Marilyn Cruz  2 , Miguel Angel Garcia-Bereguiain  1
Affiliations

"One health" inspired SARS-CoV-2 surveillance: The Galapagos Islands experience

Byron Freire-Paspuel et al. One Health. .

Erratum in

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread worldwide since the outbreak in Wuhan (China) in December 2019, currently infecting over 25 million people and causing more than 800.000 deaths. In Ecuador, up to the 30th of August 2020, overall 113.648 confirmed cases and 6.555 deaths have been declared. Besides overloading of hospital, capacity for molecular diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 by the Ministry of Public Health was quickly overwhelmed. In this context, emergency authorization for SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR diagnosis was granted to other institutions, like the "Agencia de Regulación y Control para la Bioseguridad y Cuarentena de Galápagos" (ABG), that implemented "LabGal" with support of One Health Research Group from "Universidad de Las Américas" (UDLA). The previous experience of ABG and the One Health Research Group in conducting massive surveillance of zoonotic diseases on livestock was crucial to the success on the control of COVID-19 outbreak at Galapagos Islands by the end of May 2020, when Latin American countries were leading the spread of the pandemic.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Temporal distribution of samples tested (total al positives) for SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR during the period from April 7th to May 1st 2020 at “LabGal”.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Galapagos Island Map showing the total population of each of the inhabited islands and the percentage of population tested for SARS-CoV-2. No tests were performed at Floreana due to the total lock of the island.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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