White House plans massive boost in testing for variant coronavirus strains

Testing, tracing and isolating were overlooked epidemic control tactics in 2020. New effort includes creation of genomic epidemiology centers and a national bioinformatics infrastructure.

The Biden Administration is using $1.7 billion from the American Rescue Plan to support CDC, state and local health departments detect coronavirus mutations with dramatically expanded surveillance testing, infrastructure for sharing key public health data, and new scientific endeavors to improve the field of genomic epidemiology.

Surveillance testing, usually done by genetic sequencing of random samples or pooled blood or waste water, was done by few jurisdictions before February, when the CDC launched a comprehensive approach to variant surveillance. At that time, the CDC labs were getting only 750 samples a week, although other testing was done by a consortium announced in May 2020.

Ending the pandemic requires a combination of

• Comprehensive testing to identify those who are infected with COVID-19,

• Surveillance testing so that health officials detect variants and outbreaks early enough to isolate and prevent more cases spreading, and

• Vaccinations so that people are less likely to become infected sick or die.

Overall, U.S. laboratories were sequencing about 8,000 COVID-19 samples per week around the end of January and about 29,000 per week since the Biden administration allocated $200 million to increase genomic sequencing. With the increased spread of the more virulent B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the United Kingdom, health experts have said that monitoring for this and other variants are one of the most important variables in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new funding provides about $1 million to $6 million to most states, with larger grants, including to California ($17 million for the state plus $6 million for Los Angeles county,) Texas ($15.5 million for the state plus $2.2 million for Houston,) Florida ($12.7 million.) Details are on the White House website.

In other news:

• Pfizer’s CEO says we should expect yearly booster shots against COVID-19.

• Rival vaccine makers declined an invitation from Johnson & Johnson to collaborate on investigating the rare blood clots that. prompted U.S. officials to temporarily halt use of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine, the Wall Street Journal reported.

• In an at-times contentious Congressional hearing Thursday, NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the current rate of about 60,000 new COVID-19 cases per day is dangerously high and the rate must be under about 10,000 new cases per day for anyone to consider the outbreak under control.

• At the same hearing, the administration’s top COVID-19 science officer, Dr. David Kessler, said that plans were underway for new and additional vaccines that take the variants into account, even though the current vaccines appear to be effective against the known variants so far.

That’s it for today. Have a safe weekend. Please share this newsletter and your comments.