A total of 817 SARS-CoV-2 sequences collected since October 2022 in mainland China have been released, covering 79 Pangolin lineages (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ncov/monitoring/country/China). One of the largest lineages is BF.7 (278, 34%), whose sequences were collected from Beijing (208, 74.8%), Shanghai (30, 10.8%) and Fujian (18, 6.5%), between October and December 2022. Sequence comparison revealed that the recent BF.7 sequences in China are completely distinct from BF.7 and its 18 sub-lineages (as of January 7, 2023). There are additional five new mutations concurrently to BF.7, namely V274L in ORF1a, L238F in ORF1b, C1243F in S, H47Y in ORF7a, and C29632T in ORF10. This suggests that there is an independent BF.7 sub-lineage spreading in China, which had also been proposed (https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/1470) and has been designated as BF.7.14 recently in Pangolin.
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