Thread by @DrEricDing

Wow—$1.7 billion investment in fighting #COVID19 variants just announced by Biden Administration to help states and other jurisdictions more effectively fight these mutations—including $1 billion for ramping up gene sequencing! That’s 🇺🇸 leadership. 🧵
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…

2) “An essential component of the response to the emerging COVID-19 variants is increasing the country’s genomic sequencing — process by which COVID DNA is decoded and potentially deadly mutations in the virus are detected.”

Hear that BC 🇨🇦 health Chief @DrBonnieHenry? #bcpoli

3) Many places not sequencing enough. But some places like BC 🇨🇦 is refusing outright to sequence new cases regularly. Instead they will only do sparse background sequencing. Here was BC’s final sequencing report before regular sequencing stopped.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1382181545709027331

4) Back to Biden’s 1.7 billion funding — “CDC will expand that even further and, importantly, provide states with more resources to expand their own efforts to increase geographic coverage of sequencing to better detect emerging threats like variants.”

5) “This will mean that both existing and any new COVID variants could be detected faster, before they grow prevalent.”

6) $1 billion to expand genomic sequencing:

7) $400 million to support innovation initiatives including the launch of new innovative Centers of Excellence in Genomic Epidemiology:

8) $300 million to build and support a National Bioinformatics Infrastructure

9) Without gene sequencing, we would not know this hotel outbreak were all linked to same cases during hotel quarantine! Gene sequencing tells us so much on how it’s spread.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1383251471760707586