COVID-19 and its family tree

Political will to explore possible breakthroughs lacking in Republican ranks

OK, I can be a bit of a science geek.

But if you read much of what I write, you probably already suspect that.

Over the weekend, I was reading a Washington Post story about a COVID-19 outbreak in an Iowa meatpacking plant. Meat-packing plant outbreaks haven’t been unusual, because the working conditions in many plants — including close quarters — have sparked many cases.

But what was interesting about this case is that the plant didn’t actually reveal that it was having an outbreak. The cluster was tracked down by a cancer researcher who, on his own time, sequenced the genome of cases in his area, and was able to show a tree of related cases — all of which had direct connections to the same meat-packing facility.

I’m paraphrasing here, but the basic premise is that even viruses carry a complex genetic code, and as the virus reproduces, small fragments of the tens of thousands of pieces of that code mutate in unique ways, and then pass that mutation on to every single viral “offspring,” for lack of a better word. The changes don’t necessarily alter the way the virus behaves, but they act as unique markers.

The researcher, Paraic Kenny, got samples of the virus from COVID-19 patients in his area, sequenced them in the cancer research laboratory where he worked (a non-essential laboratory temporarily shut down during the pandemic), and used a global genomic database to find how the cases fit together. The nexus? The Agri Star Meat and Poultry plant in Postville, Iowa.

On the one hand, it’s a sign of how scores of people are working, sometimes on their own time, to add scraps of information to our overall and changing knowledge of COVID-19.

On the other hand, it opens some interesting possibilities, especially as it seems more and more apparent that a number of senior U.S. politicians, including President Donald Trump and his wife Melania, may have gotten COVID-19 at the same function, a virtually mask-less, close-quarters reception for Trump’s new Supreme Court candidate, Amy Coney Barrett.

Now, it may not be the kind of science that anyone in the senior Republican ranks wants done right now, mere weeks before a presidential election — and it would take a few weeks to fully track, because it takes time for mutations to be found. But it would be a great public object lesson to show how COVID-19 transmission actually works, especially in situations where people feel they neither need to maintain physical distancing, nor wear masks.

There’s plenty of social media conspiracy talk about the Rose Garden cluster already.

Some people have gone so far as to suggest that the fact that non-mask-wearing Republicans are getting the virus while Democrats aren’t is proof of some kind of darkstate deliberate infection conspiracy.

Injecting some cold, scientific hard facts into the route the infection took to reach the president — and how it almost certainly will travel outwards to White House staff and families and beyond — might go a long way towards explaining why universal precautions against the virus are needed, even in areas where there aren’t many cases.

The best way to stop bad things from happening again, is to find out how they happened in the first place. A genetic family tree could be the key to that — and a single cancer genetics researcher managed to do one in Iowa on his own initiative.

The tools are there. I suspect the political will is lacking.