“…If anything, the subsequent isolation of sequences of patients from Portugal, Brazil, Wales, and the Netherlands, which were identical to the pre-existing Italian sequence, illustrates our point precisely: "it is not possible with the present data to decide which branching pattern (and, therefore, which phylogeographic reconstruction) most likely represents actual dissemination routes among European countries." Forster and Forster [1] go on to discuss how the Welsh, both Dutch, and Brazilian patients had all visited Italy a few days before falling ill. This is interesting information that may suggest such patients were infected in Italy; after all, contact tracing is presently considered the golden standard for tracking SARS-CoV-2 dissemination, but it has very little to do with the central problem raised in our paper [7]: branching patterns in the phylogeny alone, especially when based on several identical sequences from different geographic areas (one of the very definitions of a lack of a phylogenetic signal in any basic textbook [11], which Forster and Forster [1] seem to ignore) cannot distinguish among different and equally likely dissemination scenarios.…”