Keeping an Eye on COVID Clusters With Rapid Sequencing
“Every time the SARS-CoV-2 virus passes from person to person, it may make copying errors that change a couple of its 30,000 genetic letters.”
Contact tracing is a powerful tool used by public health authorities to help slow the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Those in close contact with infected individuals can swiftly be informed, tested, and advised to self-isolate, thus lowering the risk of the COVID-19 virus spreading further.
Not every case cluster is so easy to track, however. Scientists have found a way of mapping case networks more efficiently, by leveraging one of the virus’s hallmark flaws.
“Every time the SARS-CoV-2 virus passes from person to person, it may make copying errors that change a couple of its 30,000 genetic letters”, explains Rowena Bull, a researcher from Australia’s University of New South Wales.
“By identifying this genetic variation, we can establish how different cases of coronavirus are linked — to know where a case was potentially picked up from and who they may have given it to.”
Bull and colleagues have spearheaded the development of a superior method of contact tracing by employing next-generation genome…
