Noisy Genome Data and Faulty Clade Statistics Undermine Conclusions on SARS-CoV-2 Evolution and Strain Typing in the Brazilian Epidemy: A Technical Note

We show that low quality of all 427 Brazilian SARS-CoV-2 genomes recently published in Science (1) challenges their phylogenetic inference and may lead to incorrect typing of viral strains in clades with no statistical support. Absence of basecalling quality in genome assemblies and proper phylogeny parameter estimates preclude the assessment of signal-to-noise ratio in the data, downstream analysis and conclusions.