In late 2018, a paper in the journal Nature Microbiology proposed a hypothetical scenario: A young man comes into a Miami hospital with flu-like symptoms and di…
for analyzing that data. Genomics have become integral in responding to and tracking food-borne illnesses and the flu.
At least one researcher was disturbed by what he saw. On Jan. 31, Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, wrotein which he described many closely related strains of the virus coming out of China and southeast Asia in mid-January— evidence that the virus was spreading quickly between patients without much time to mutate.
Although it’s now obvious that the novel coronavirus spreads quickly between humans, that information was critical for guiding an early response. If the disease was transmitted repeatedly by animals — as in the case of the mosquito-borne Zika or MERS, another deadly illness linked to a coronavirus — the answer would have been to limit contact with the host animals. Otherwise, more dramatic quarantine measures would be needed.
“The first step in responding to an outbreak like this is really understanding where your cases are, and how many you have,” MacCannell said. In other words, the first step is to run lots of tests. In the first weeks of the American outbreak, the CDC was able to sequence every virus it received within two days — but it received fewer than 100 tests in the first place.
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