In the last 30 days or so, samples from four states alone - New York, California, Florida and Washington - represented about 30% of the country’s sequences, according to data from the United States Mutation Report. That’s not just “unacceptable,” but “nearly worthless,” said Sam Scarpino, a bioinformatics assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab.Įspecially, Scarpino added, considering the geographic bias plaguing national genomic sequencing. Right now, even after concerted efforts to increase sequencing capacity, only about 3% of the country’s positive COVID-19 samples were sequenced in early April. “A majority of labs that have explored or entertained the idea have decided not to pursue it.” “Sometimes you sort of have to pick a direction,” she said. “These assays can give a preliminary answer to ‘What variants are out there?’”īut some public health authorities are skeptical about the widespread adoption of a new surveillance technique during the pandemic’s final stages - especially if they’ve already worked to ramp up sequencing, said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “The reality is there are places that are just not set up for sequencing,” said Chantal Vogels, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. Several diagnostic testing companies, including Bio-Rad, Agena and Roche, have also developed their own variant-specific screens in recent months. and Denmark already use these tests as part of their national virus-tracking systems.

The idea is to complement - not to replace - the U.S.’s slow-growing genomic sequencing capacity, since sequencing remains the gold-standard for virus surveillance.

So some epidemiologists are advocating for an easier, cheaper, and faster way to help track variants’ paths through the country: a souped-up version of widely available COVID-19 diagnostic tests that can flag samples with any problematic genetic tweaks. It’s also expensive, slow, and currently almost nonexistent in the United States. Genomic sequencing is one of the best defenses against potentially deadlier or more transmissible variants of the coronavirus.

Agena covid testing