In tracking virus mutations, most countries flying blind

It’s not the big mystery anymore and nowadays also many smaller local laboratories could do such genome sequencing. Just take some money in the hand, equip them with staff and resources and do it.

It’s not the big mystery anymore and nowadays also many smaller local laboratories could do such genome sequencing. Just take some money in the hand, equip them with staff and resources and do it.

In general it is possible as long as the lab has access to one next-generation sequencing machine, but it is not efficient to do it. Coronavirus genomes are very short, so they cannot fully use the advantage of the technology that makes sequencing cheap, one viral sample is 30,000 "letters" long, and the current technology is made to read millions of letters for each sample, so the sequences would be read dozens and dozens of times without need.

The best approach is to have small laboratories and hospitals collect the samples, do the first part of the work (convert RNA into DNA) and then send the samples and all the information to a central laboratory dedicated exclusively to do the sequencing work. On one single run they could process close to a hundred of samples for a fraction of the cost.

UK warns new coronavirus variant could be more deadly | DW News - YouTube

apparently the UK is saying that the new strain could be 30% more deadly.

@AlyR.

30% is more kind of an estimated weighted average...

In more details, the span we can possibly expect, goes from 7% up to 171% , that means from almost insignificant changes up to nearly tripled values.

[ a. LSHTM: reported that the relative hazard of death within 28 days of test for VOC-infected individuals compared to non-VOC was 1.35 (95%CI 1.08-1.68).

b. Imperial College London: mean ratio of CFR for VOC-infected individuals compared to non-VOC was 1.36 (95%CI 1.18-1.56) by a case-control weighting method, 1.29 (95%CI 1.07-1.54) by a standardised CFR method.

c. University of Exeter: mortality hazard ratio for VOC-infected individuals compared to non-VOC was 1.91 (1.35 - 2.71).]

Thank you for that Sven.

Lets just wait and see what the next couple of weeks will bring- although its hard to be optimistic