The coronavirus pandemic is entering its third year, and the United States still isn’t doing enough to track the virus.
It’s not just a testing shortfall. The U.S. government is failing to meet these requirements. “genomic surveillance” — that is, sequencing enough tests in the right places at the right times in order to keep tabs on the latest, more transmissible variants. They are. They could spread to other places.
The surveillance gap existed one year ago. This was before the Delta variant wiped out much of the progress made by the country in driving down the number of cases and relieving hospital pressure. The curve was reshaped once again by the Omicron lineage.
Now it’s even worse — and even less forgivable. “We’re doing very badly,”Lawrence Gostin is a Georgetown University global health expert. Rolling Stone.Too few Americans get tested. Sequencing laboratories require more stable funding. A dearth of samples and cash mean we don’t have a clear picture of a fast-changing pandemic. We don’t know what we’re dealing with today. We don’t know what to expect tomorrow.
Gostin claims that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have no good data about new variants because the CDC has shared their sequencing with partner agencies in South Africa, Israel, and the UK. Sequencing can be used to tell one lineage apart and to identify specific genetic changes that have made the coronavirus even scarier.
“Surveillance is better than it was at the start of the pandemic,”Gostin admits. “But we’re still behind our partners. There’s no reason for that because we’re the richest country in the world.” (The CDC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Viral surveillance is complex. Christopher Mason, a biophysicist from Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, tells Rolling Stone that in the United States, health departments in each state collect swabs from pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics — as well as fecal samples from sewers and septic systems — and hand them off to state laboratories or share them with private and university labs. Mason says it is. “a patchwork.”
The lab’s test staff run the swabs through high-tech machines that break down any virus and examine its nucleic acids, providing them with a detailed map detailing the virus’s genome. The CDC collates the data from the labs in order to paint a comprehensive picture of the virus’s spread and evolution.
Sequencing can be a time-consuming and delicate job that requires both high-powered computers and a lot expertise. It’s not the kind of thing you can fund piecemeal. But that’s exactly what the U.S. system does. The CDC relies on short-term grants for many of its sequencing labs. These grants rarely last more than two years.
It takes a lot of time and manpower just to apply for the grants — and success is never guaranteed. How does Mason’s lab get by? “White knuckles and gritted teeth, and working with everyone and anyone who can help us,”He stated.
Joe Biden ran on the promise to dramatically increase Covid-19 surveillance. “The president-elect supports a national testing program that can help stop the spread of Covid-19 and find variants,”T.J. Ducklo is a spokesperson for Biden Submitted The New York Times January 2008. “That means more tests, increased lab capacity, and genome sequencing.”
But a year later, the feds aren’t doing enough to keep labs afloat. “The big thing we need is to have sustained funding for these efforts, over decades, not bursts of months or two-year grants,”Mason: “That’s the only way the network will be robust against the inexorable march to the emergence of new variants of existing, and emerging, pathogens.”
The news is only slightly better when it comes to testing capacity in the United States — that is, the first step in the CDC’s Covid surveillance system. Comparable to overall surveillance “there seems to be more emphasis on being able to widely test individuals,”Stephanie James is the chief of a Covid laboratory at Regis University in Colorado. But you need both — the close look (testing) and the wide view (surveillance) — to create a clear picture of the pandemic.
There are approximately 20,000 testing facilities in the United States, both for government and private providers. The Defense Production Act gives the government greater control of private manufacturing. This allows the government to stock more pharmacies with test kits.
“But it’s not enough,” Biden spoke Tuesday in a speech. “We have to do more.”The president announced that 500 million rapid test kits would be purchased by the federal government and that a website will be created where anyone can order home delivery for next month.
Half a billion tests isn’t a lot in a country with 330 million people, says Rob Knight, head of a genetic-computation lab at the University of California, San Diego. “It is a woefully inadequate start,”He said, “and I predict a lot of debates even within each family about who and when to test.”
You might be able to get free kits Very slightly boost America’s dismal test rate. Just four out 100,000 Americans are tested daily. According toEric Topol is the Scripps Research Translational Institute’s director. For comparison, Denmark — a world leader in Covid surveillance — tests 35 people per 100,000 every day.
But a modest boost in testing isn’t going to solve the overall surveillance problem — and it won’t give us early warning of any dangerous new lineages. While new pathogen-detecting technology is currently under development may help, we still need to be vigilant. “a lot of effort and money,”Knight:
It’s a problem we should have solved a long time ago. Ideally before the pandemic; more realistically, once it was clear — two years ago — just how dangerous the novel coronavirus might be.
But the administration of ex-president Donald Trump dawdled, and the Biden administration — so far — has done only slightly better. “We need to hold him to account,”Gostin spoke out about Biden.
Yes, we’re late. However, we can still save many lives by enhancing surveillance now. This is not only for the current pandemic. It could also be for the next one. “We keep hoping that Covid is going away, but hope hasn’t been a very effective strategy so far,”Knight: “It’s never too late to build good testing and surveillance.”