Image On February 27, 2020, Sub-Saharan Africa reported its first case of the coronavirus (COVID-19). The patient was an Italian man living in Nigeria, who had just returned from Milan in Italy, which was then a cluster for the disease in Europe. Shortly after the patient was identified, a sample of the virus was sent to a small town called Ede, located in Osun State, southwestern Nigeria, over 200 kilometers away from Lagos. There, a team led by Professor Christian Happi, analyzed the sample and was able within 48 hours to share the very first genome sequence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) from Africa with the global science community— faster than what was being done in some developed countries and, more importantly, much faster than sending it to a laboratory overseas.