Thread by @PeterHotez

THREAD 1/5: I know this is not very nice just a couple of days before Christmas but I have to say I'm concerned about the CDC press release today, and the status our virus genomics surveillance program SPHERE

THREAD 2/5: Here's the statement: "Given the small fraction of US infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States without having been detected"

THREAD 3/5: And this one: "The VOC 202012/01 variant has not been identified through sequencing efforts in the United States, although viruses have only been sequenced from about 51,000 of the 17 million US cases"

THREAD 4/5: By comparison the UK program for a much smaller country says it has sequenced 157,000 genomes, roughly that means we're performing at about 1/10th the capacity of the UK program?

THREAD 5/5: So not only are we missing the UK variant, but there may be other US homegrown variants that we're totally missing? How can this be, 10 months into the pandemic, still such terrible inefficiencies?

THREAD 6/5: Here are the links highlighted above from US and UK

cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…

cogconsortium.uk