Puja Changoiwala writes:

Back at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the disease had even drawn the attention of much of the world, researchers in China and Australia mapped the genome of the coronavirus isolated from one of the first patients in the Wuhan outbreak. This first genetic blueprint of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was publicly released soon after, on January 10, 2020. The disclosure of that genome, and others that soon followed, guided the vigorous international scientific response to the pandemic, including the timely development of diagnostic tests, surveillance strategies, vaccines and other new tools for managing the outbreak.

As a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) noted, because technology can now read the genome of a virus sample from a patient in just a few hours, “for the first time, genomic sequencing in real time has been able to inform the public health response to a pandemic.” All the successes that countries have had in coping with the pandemic are built on measures arising from our knowledge of its viral genome.

Yet the need to collect information about the SARS-CoV-2 genome is far from over. “It is too early to conclude how and when the pandemic will end,” said Meng Ling Moi, deputy director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Tropical and Emerging Viral Diseases. Although numbers are dropping, more than 2.5 million new infections and more than 64,000 deaths were reported in the week before June 22, with significant increases in many countries. Health authorities attribute the strength and persistence of the pandemic to highly contagious variants of the virus that are spreading around the globe. [Continue reading…]