January 22 that the United States has lagged behind in many aspects of the coronavirus response – from the initial lack of testing to the current panic and clumsy launch of a report published by Vaux on January 14 entitled “Embarrassing”: the United States’s imperfect tracking of the mutation of the novel coronavirus.
Coronavirus vaccine. The lack of genetic monitoring is only another aspect. The full text is excerpted as follows:
A more infectious variant of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was first discovered in the UK for a reason: the UK has conducted a large number of virus gene sequencing.
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, researchers in the United Kingdom have uploaded 151,859 individual sequences of SARS-CoV-2 to the Global Initiative for Influenza Data Sharing (GISAID) on the international viral genome data sharing platform. The UK is the country with the largest number of gene sequences shared in the world.
If a more infectious strain of COVID-19 first appeared in the United States, scientists would probably not have noticed it so soon.
According to GISAID, although the U.S. population exceeds that of the United Kingdom, it has a cutting-edge biomedical research industry, and tens of millions more cases of COVID-19, only 69,111 sequences have been uploaded in laboratories in the United States so far.
“I can only say, it’s embarrassing,” Diana Griffin, a microbiologist and immunologist at Johns Hopkins University, told reporters.
The U.S. is lagging behind in many aspects of its response to the coronavirus pandemic – from the initial lack of testing to the fumble rollout of a coronavirus vaccine now.
The lack of genetic monitoring is only another aspect.
A July 2020 report from the National Academy of Sciences said: “The current source of data for the genome sequences of COVID-19 …
is fragmented in the United States, usually passive, responsive, uncoordinated and underfunded.” The report found that it was “not enough to answer many urgent questions about the evolution and spread of COVID-19”.
