White House announces $1 6B effort to boost coronavirus testing, sequencing
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So researchers here in Massachusetts are trying to get ahead of those variants by using what’s called genetic sequencing “sequence the genetic code of viruses that are causing infections, COVID infections in the Worcester area, and then use that information to track the evolution and spread of the virus through the community,” said Dr. Bronwyn MacInnis, the director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute.
Through an existing partnership with UMass Memorial Medical School, the institute is using material they already have from COVID tests to do the genetic sequencing, MacInnis said.
“By and large, it’s leftover material that was used initially to do the diagnostic of an individual,” she said, “but then we’re looking at it at the kind of population level without any individual information.”
A biotech conference in Boston last February that s already been flagged as a COVID-19 superspreading event led to at least 245,000 other cases across the U.S. and Europe, a new genetic fingerprinting study shows. One single case seems to have been responsible for many of the other eventual cases, the team at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts reported. Their study finds two particular genetic fingerprints of viruses associated with the conference and then tracks those lineages across the U.S. One was exported from Boston to at least 18 US states as well as to other countries, including Australia, Sweden, and Slovakia, the team, led by Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute, wrote in the journal Science.
The United States had its first coronavirus superspreader event during a two-day conference in Boston organized by the biotech company Biogen in February. Genetic testing has revealed that what began with 99 people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 at the event, another 205,000–300,000 cases subsequently resulted as the attendees returned home to 29 states and several other countries, carrying the virus with them, according to a study published in
Science on December 10.
A national database of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and contact tracing has allowed the authors to track which strains were being transmitted. As
reports, the proportion of the pandemic attributed to the conference is roughly 1.6 percent of all US COVID-19 cases.
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