US behind Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe in gene sequencing, claims paper

The United States lags many other countries in employing the essential tool for keeping abreast of variants – gene sequencing – increasing the risk that a variant could spread undetected, USA Today reported.

This year, the United States ranks 33rd in the world for its rate of sequencing, falling between Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe, according to COVID CoV Genomic, led by researchers at Harvard and MIT.

The top three nations – Iceland, Australia and New Zealand – sequenced at a rate 55 to 95 times greater.

Sequencing happens behind the scenes when someone gets tested for the coronavirus. If the test is positive, the sample may be sent to another lab for sequencing, especially if the person has had COVID-19 before or has been vaccinated. That provides the genetic code of a virus, laying out for scientists a precise map for how to defeat it.

For some reasons, sequencing results in the US go only to researchers, not to those who got tested. That could become a problem if the variant demands a different approach to treatment or proves resistant to existing vaccines.

Public laboratories in the United Kingdom, considered a model for tracking the virus, sequence a third of positive coronavirus tests, according to the COVID-19 Genomic UK Consortium. Through those efforts they discovered the B.1.1.7 variant first in September. On Dec 14, scientists there reported this new variant was far more contagious and could be more lethal.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tries to sequence at least 7,000 positive test samples a week, about 2 percent of new cases. Some say it needs to do more; a 2 percent rate could mean not catching new variants early enough.

By early January, laboratories in the US had detected only 76 cases of the variant first detected in Britain. It was estimated at 5 percent of new cases. Since then, the variant has exploded. Another fast-spreading variant, B.1.526 – which was first detected in New York – reached 36 percent, according to CoVariants.org.

Until the entire world is vaccinated, there's a chance the virus could mutate in ways that evade detection, treatments or vaccines. Keeping a close eye on variants gives vaccine makers a chance to stay ahead of the virus.

Knowing the genetic makeup of a virus has many advantages, including the ability to track changes in the virus and find effective treatments and vaccines.

The ability to sequence has increased dramatically in recent years. Faster technology led to a public-health breakthrough in 2014, when scientists from the Broad Institute at Harvard University used sequencing in West Africa, on early patients of Ebola. By understanding how the virus spread, it made it easier to stop that spread.

In the US, for years sequencing was largely left to state laboratories and wasn't a high priority. Although technology for sequencing has improved dramatically in the past decade, some states are still catching up, said the report.