What Is Genomic Surveillance And Why We Need More Of It To Track Coronavirus Variants And Help End The COVID-19 Pandemic
“You can’t fix what you don’t measure” is a maxim in the business world. And it holds true in the world of public health as well.
Sequencing the genetic code of virus samples taken from COVID-19 patients reveals how SARS-CoV-2 is spreading and changing. Nate Langer/UPMC, CC BY-ND
Early in the pandemic, the United States struggled to meet the demand to test people for SARS-CoV-2. That failure meant officials didn’t know the true number of people who had COVID-19. They were left to respond to the pandemic without knowing how quickly it was spreading and what interventions minimized risks.
Now the U.S. faces a similar issue with a different type of test: genetic sequencing. Unlike a COVID-19 test that diagnoses infection, genetic sequencing decodes the genome of SARS-CoV-2 virus in samples ...