Thread by @DrEricDing

YOU CAN’T FIND MUTATIONS ==> IF YOU DON’T GENETIC 🧬 SEQUENCE.

Australia 🇦🇺 & New Zealand 🇳🇿 is leading the world of ~half of all viruses in their countries sequenced.

UK 🇬🇧 leads in total #SARSCoV2 samples sequenced.

USA 🇺🇸 ranks—#43 in % 🧬 sequenced. So #winning, not.🧵

2) “Given the small fraction of U.S. infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States without having been detected,” the CDC wrote on its website.

3) Remember the old saying, “No testing, no pandemic”?

📌Same goes for virus mutations. “No sequencing, no new mutated variants”

➡️We can’t be ostrich in the sand about this. To stop pandemic, we have to stay ahead of it—know when it’s changing or becoming more contagious.

4) new data on viral load of the new UK mutation... I wrote a thread yesterday on it.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1341672654038835200

5) wow... Another way to view this—my FAS team graphed the rate of genomic sequenced 🧬 virus samples per million #COVID19 cases...

UK 🇬🇧 sequenced 23x more than the USA 🇺🇸.

—superb job to 🇬🇧 scientist

—We will not find new mutation fast enough in US this way.

6) “It’s like a giant canvas where one corner has been painted in extraordinary detail but rest is blank. No matter how vivid that one corner might be, it can’t illuminate the whole picture.”

Great @nytimes piece. nytimes.com/2020/12/22/opi…

7) “current situation is reminiscent of the pandemic’s early days, when virus first detected in Wuhan, and U.S. officials enacted a travel ban against visitors from China — w/out realizing virus was already spreading through Europe and would soon make its way to US from there.”

8) “to truly solve this problem, federal officials need to increase the nation’s disease surveillance efforts, and in particular its genomic surveillance. Until they do that, we will be stuck in the same place: making often brutal sacrifices to try to slow the spread”

9) UK also was able to trace the location of 67,000 (not 63k) carriers of the new B.1.1.7 mutation. They were able to do this via a shortcut PCR test for the new variant (this is in addition to the full genomic virus sequencing)

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1341378611551596544