Medical researchers and supercomputers are turning genetics labs into virus detective agencies, looking to find the novel coronavirus itself within blood samples from thousands of infected patients.
OTTAWA -- For the last four months, Canada's public health experts have been racing to stop the spread of COVID-19 by trying to figure out how everyone is getting it, and whom they may have given it to.
"This is the big effort over the next four weeks," said Andrew McArthur, director of the biomedical discovery and commercialization program at McMaster University. It means, for example, a long-term care centre should be able to quickly know if its 10 new cases are because one case spread widely or arose from multiple carriers coming into the facility.It also means that maybe, just maybe, the second COVID-19 wave most think is coming won't be as bad, or as hard to control, as the first, because the sources can be isolated very quickly.
This genetic mapping is constantly on the look-out for mutations. Thus far, SARS-CoV-2, the official name for the virus that causes COVID-19, has not mutated as quickly as many others do. Influenza, for instance, changes so much over a year the vaccine has to be retooled every summer to keep up. Genome Canada is administering the project, with six regional genomics agencies overseeing the work locally and labs like McArthur's doing the testing and analysis. The funding is intended to create genetic maps from 150,000 patients. Canada thus far has had about 108,000 positive cases, and the expectation is that almost every one of them will be gene-mapped.
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