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Search and also you shall discover
In another context, it will have been unremarkable: On Sunday, Nov. 28, a San Francisco resident who had been feeling mildly in poor health took a Covid check. The following day, it got here again optimistic.
What set off alarm bells, nevertheless, was that the resident had lately returned from South Africa, the place the newly found Omicron variant was widespread.
The traveler’s check pattern was flagged for precedence genomic sequencing, which might reveal the exact genetic code of the virus that had contaminated the traveler — and whether or not it had Omicron’s telltale mutations.
Dr. Chiu, the San Francisco microbiologist, was tapped to do the sequencing. By 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 30, just some hours after Dr. Chiu first discovered in regards to the pattern, it was hand-delivered to his lab, packed in dry ice.
Dr. Chiu and his colleagues shortly set to work. Though producing the complete sequence takes hours, the scientists selected to make use of a method often known as nanopore sequencing, which allowed them to research the ends in real-time, whereas the method was nonetheless underway.
“As the info accrued, we had been in a position to establish increasingly mutations,” Dr. Chiu recalled.
Earlier than daybreak, he was sure: It was Omicron, the primary case discovered in the US. Lower than per week had handed since South Africa first publicly introduced the existence of the variant.
We can’t battle what we can’t see, and stopping the subsequent pandemic begins with detecting and monitoring the pathogens that threaten us. In that regard, no less than, “we’re terribly higher off than we had been this time final 12 months,” stated Joseph Fauver, a genomic epidemiologist on the College of Nebraska Medical Middle in Omaha.
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