Genetic sequencing: U.S. lags behind in key tool against coronavirus mutations - The Wa... - 0 views
-
The lack of widespread genetic sequencing means the window is closing to find and slow the spread of variants such as the one first spotted in Britain, which appears to be much more transmissible, and those initially detected in Brazil and South Africa. All have been discovered in small numbers in the United States.
-
Now is when genetic sequencing — a process that maps out the genetic code of the particular virus that infected someone so it can be compared with others — would do the most good, while such variants are less prevalent in the U.S. population and action can be taken against them.
-
“We are in a race against time because of these mutations. And in that race, we are falling behind,”
- ...17 more annotations...
-
The problem echoes the country’s catastrophic stumbles early in the pandemic, when a lack of testing allowed the virus to spread widely. Currently, only a tiny fraction of all positive coronavirus tests in the United States are forwarded for further sequencing.
-
t if scientists don’t know what strains are moving through the population, the mutations that matter may pop up undetected.
-
For months, scientists have been sounding alarms and trying to ramp up genetic sequencing of test samples, but the effort has been plagued by a lack of funding, political will and federal coordination
-
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the government is increasing the level of sequencing nationwide.“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,”
-
Ultimately, the country needs real-time data — similar to the dashboards now used to track daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths — to track variants and their prevalence across the country
-
The U.S. effort is so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to say exactly how many virus cases are sequenced daily.
-
The CDC has warned that the variant found in the United Kingdom — which British scientists said could be up to 70 percent more transmissible — could become dominant in the United States by March.
-
It also recently contracted with four private companies — Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix — to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said.
-
Illumina estimates that the country needs to sequence 5 percent of its coronavirus cases to detect a new variant when the variant represents about 0.1 percent to 1.0 percent of the country’s case
-
The United States has sequenced 84,177 samples out of 25.7 million cases as of Friday, according to a Washington Post analysis. By comparison, the United Kingdom, in ninth place, has sequenced 214,000 genomes — almost 6 percent — of the country’s 3.7 million cases.
-
Unlike the United States, the U.K. invested in genetic sequencing early on in the pandemic, launching its genomics consortium in March with a $27 million investment and a multimillion-dollar boost late last year.
-
Even before the emergence of mutations such as the variants first discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, U.S. experts had been warning for months about the need for a national standard for genetic surveillance.
-
In May, the CDC launched a surveillance program for the coronavirus called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance). But, in practice, the program relied on a haphazard patchwork of academic labs contributing genetic sequencing on a volunteer basis.
-
A July report by the National Academies of Science said that “poor funding, coordination, and capacity” had led to a “patchy, typically passive, and reactive” U.S. sequencing effort.