U.S. push to find COVID variants remains piecemeal

U.S. efforts to detect dangerous, fast-moving COVID19 mutations that are already bedeviling states remain slim and disconnected as the Biden administration seeks to speed up the process.

While as many as 7,000 to 8,000 samples are being analyzed weekly, that’s just 1.7% of the 463,843 new cases in the U.S. last week, making it little more than a random effort. Meanwhile, three highly-contagious variants have gained significant footholds in the country, with two showing an ability to evade — though not yet overcome — existing vaccines.

State health departments directly send just 770 of the samples analyzed by U.S. health officials, with the rest coming from academic, commercial and state labs. That can lead to over-sampling in areas where labs are located. And the academic labs often have little direct contact with local health depar tments that need to swiftly start contact tracing to control spread, said David Haussler, scientific director at the University of California-santa Cruz Genomics Institute.

“We should be doing vastly more,” Haussler said in a telephone interview. “With that light level of sampling, by the time you notice it, it’s already spread too far to do anything about it.” The U.S. should model their efforts after the U.K., he added. That country reported a 10.9% sequencing rate for samples collected during the last week in Januar y.

Variants that have emerged from the U.K., South Africa and Brazil are all now circulating in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with at least 1,688 cases identified since the first of the three turned up in the country less than two months ago.

States in the Great Plains region, where cases are increasing again, rank in the bottom half in the countr y for cumulative samples sequenced and published publicly, according to data from the CDC. Since Januar y 2020, North Dakota and Nebraska have sequenced just 0.1% of cases and South Dakota has only sequenced 0.09%. Hawaii, Maine, Wyoming, Washington and Utah rank among the highest, ranging from 1.6% to 3.5%.

National and academic labs are producing the rest of the samples in a system that Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to President Joe Biden on the pandemic, said on Thursday “hasn’t been interconnected.”