The student did not stand out from the almost 700 corona cases that the Steglitz-Zehlendorf health department recorded in the week before Christmas.
The young woman was visiting her family on a holiday;
she came from her place of study in Great Britain.
An everyday case in the affluent south of Berlin.
That she got infected wasn't surprising either.
It matched the number of cases that were soaring on the island.
But the student infected her entire family, five people.
That is rather rare.
At the same time, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sounded the alarm: The new, far more contagious virus variant B.1.1.7 is spreading in the south-east of England, he warned the world public.
They reacted quickly: flight connections were discontinued, the Eurotunnel closed.
But by then the mutated virus had long since spread in Europe.
It was a coincidence that an employee of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf health department witnessed the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and also did her doctorate in virology.
Shortly before Christmas, she called the laboratory at the Robert Koch Institute and asked to have the genome sequence of the student's positive virus sample deciphered.
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