As the British variant spreads to the United States, scientists warn that the country isn’t doing enough to track Covid stocks.

As more cases More infectious mutants of coronavirus When detected in the United States, scientists have not done enough for the country to track genetic changes in the virus, exposing Americans to the darkness of potentially dangerous new strains. There is growing concern that there is.

To date, at least 50 of the first coronavirus variants found in the United Kingdom have been identified in the United States.In the UK, due to the rapid spread of a mutant known as B.1.1.7, the country Strict blockade of the week As the number of cases has increased rapidly.

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Now, US scientists are catching up and competing to see how widespread British variants are in the United States.

“Obviously, we haven’t done this enough,” said Jijikwick Gronval, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Health Security Center. “You can only see where the light is, and if the light isn’t bright enough, you’ll miss many areas.”

It’s not just the British variants that American scientists are missing out on. While new variants of the virus are constantly emerging, the country needs a system to quickly detect strains that can alter the behavior of the virus or reduce the effectiveness of vaccines and treatments.

To find a new strain, you need to sequence the genetic code of the virus. This is a long process and can take days to complete, and depending on the technology, it can cost $ 10 to $ 100 per sample. This process uses samples from the Covid-19 diagnostic test.

But “it’s not that complicated,” said Brian Oroke, a human geneticist at Oregon Health & Science University. He focused his work on virus sequencing as part of the university’s Oregon SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Center. “This is similar to other sequencing efforts developed by others for other viruses.”

However, according to the non-profit GISAID initiative, the United States sequences only about 60,000 samples, or 0.3% of all cases. It is one of the few international databases that stores genetic information for over 300,000 virus samples worldwide. The number in the United States is significantly lower than in other countries such as the United Kingdom, which sequenced nearly twice as many cases.

“There is no national coordination system in place to do this on a large scale,” Oroke said. “Maybe it’s a British stock now, and it’s really a call for the awakening of many in the world of public health.”

Since then UK stocks found, The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pledged to enhance gene sequencing in the United States. A CDC spokesman has promised that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will work with state public health authorities and academic and public health laboratories to double the number of samples sequenced each week.

However, some say that the effort is too little or too late because the virus is already widespread in the country.

Joe DeRisi, co-president of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, California, said he had sequenced 10,000 samples from the state and that there was no federal program to strategically monitor viral mutations.

“We need 1,000 site sequences, just like we do,” says DeRisi. “Only a handful do this. Compared to the whole country, it’s patheticly small. There is very little surveillance being done.”

At the Oregon Center, O’Roak and his colleagues have been tracking viral mutations since the outbreak began.

Coronavirus mutations are common, O’Roak said. In fact, it appears to mutate every two weeks, which is actually slower than mutations in other common viruses, including influenza. The coronavirus has probably been mutated thousands of times since the original strain appeared in Wuhan, China in late 2019, he said, and most of his lab samples are compared to the original strain. He added that it was mutated 15 to 20 times.

“Many of these changes are one, made from a single sample, never seen again, and other changes are propagated and become more common,” O’Roak said. I am.

In most cases, the changes are silent, even for the more common variants. In other words, it is a small change in the genetic code of the virus and does not affect its operation. However, other mutations, such as British variants, are important and can affect the behavior of the virus.

But the more the virus spreads, the more chances it has to mutate, scientists say. In addition to British variants, public health officials are also keeping an eye out for South African strains that scientists fear could avoid treatment and vaccines.

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In fact, one of the biggest concerns is the potential for new variants to emerge that can reduce the effectiveness of new vaccines. (That’s why you need to get a flu shot every year because the virus changes so much that the previous year’s vaccine doesn’t work.)

“We need to understand how the virus is spreading and how it is evolving. Large-scale vaccination “It’s only been a year since I’ve been working with this virus, and I don’t really understand it, but without spotlighting the viral genome, we’ll never know,” said Oroke.

In the meantime, UK laboratories are working to determine if the mutants there affect the effectiveness of the vaccine and to better understand how contagious it is. Friday, Pfizer-BioNTech Presentation The results of a study that found that the vaccine could protect against one of the more feared mutations in the UK mutant.

Enhanced genetic surveillance of the virus has advantages as well as identifying new strains of concern, such as providing insight into how the virus has traveled from person to person.

When the coronavirus spreads to others, it leaves fingerprints of the gene, allowing scientists to compare in real time how the different strains are spreading.

In the first six months of the pandemic, O’Roak and his team identified five major sub-strains in Oregon.Some were connected on a large scale Super spreader Event.

Those strains, or their descendants, are still there, he said.

“Most of the concerns are in the early introductions, and the relatives of the virus are still infected,” he said. “It, of course, shows how widespread the virus is and is out of control.”

Tracking genetic changes can also be used to stop the development.

DeRisi said his lab is working with 28 counties in California at the forefront of the sequence. Most counties use genetic information, Contact tracing.. Using what DeRisi calls genetic epidemiology, public health officials can look up gene sequences from positive tests. Next, the genetic fingerprint goes back to the source. This can be important in environments such as agricultural facilities and elderly housing with care.

“Genetic epidemiology reveals that and provides a clear and accurate map of what the Public Health Service should investigate,” he said. “It saves hundreds of man-hours and follow-up.”

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