The United States, the country most affected by the spread of coronavirus disease (Covid-19), has not been proactive in sequencing cases to verify genetic changes, according to a global database on coronavirus genomes.
The GISAID Initiative said the United States ranks abysmally low, at 43rd. The report released last week said that of the more than 18 million cases, only 51,212 (or 0.3 percent) have been genetically tested. to detect variants.
Sequencing can help detect the spread of the virus, as well as understand whether a particular variant has reached the country. The UK, according to its health authorities, was able to sequence 7.4 percent of its documented cases, leading to the detection of the new strain in mid-December.
At the top of the sequencing list is Australia, which has sequenced 58.6% of its cases, the highest in the world, according to the GISAID Initiative database. New Zealand, Taiwan, Denmark and Iceland are the other countries to top the list.
The United States has registered its first case of the new strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which many experts were already warning about.
The Colorado man, who emerged as the first reported person in the US to have a Covid-19 variant that is spreading in the UK, had not been traveling, health officials said Monday. This prompted a series of questions about how the new strain appeared in the Rocky Mountains.
Colorado officials are expected to provide more details at a news conference Wednesday about how the man in his 20s from a mostly rural area of rolling plains on the edge of the Denver metro area contracted the variant.
India, meanwhile, sequenced more than 4,000 coronavirus genomes and submitted it to GISAID, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) director general Shekhar Mande said last week.
The Institute for Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) of CSIR, Delhi and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, have sequenced more than 2,200 sequences of the coronavirus genome in India.
Cases of the new strain have also been reported in India: six on Tuesday and 14 today, bringing the total number of infected people to 20. The Union Ministry of Health has said that all of these people have been isolated separately. , in different rooms to verify the spread of variant B117.
The variant has also been found in Canada, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates.
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