The United States, the country worst affected by the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), has not been proactive in sequencing cases to check for genetic changes, according to a global database on coronavirus genomes.
The GISAID Initiative said that the United States ranks abysmally low – at 43rd spot. The report released last week said that of the more than 18 million cases, only 51,212 (or 0.3 per cent) have been genetically analysed for variants.
The sequencing can help in detecting the spread of the virus, as well as understand if a particular variant has arrived in the country. The UK, according to its health authorities, was able to sequence 7.4 per cent of its documented cases which led to detection of the new strain in mid-December.
On the top of the sequencing list are Australia which has sequenced 58.6 per cent of its cases, the highest worldwide, according to GISAID Initiative database. New Zealand, Taiwan, Denmark and Iceland are the other countries on top of the list.
The United States has recorded 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 United Kingdom hadn’t been travelling, health officials said on Monday. This triggered a host of questions about how the new strain showed up in the Rockies.
Colorado officials are expected to provide more details at a news conference on Wednesday about how the man in his 20s from a mostly rural area of rolling plains at the edge of the Denver metro area came down with the variant.
India, meanwhile, sequenced over 4,000 genomes of the coronavirus and submitted to GISAID, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Director General Shekhar Mande said last week.
The CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad have alone done sequencing of over 2,200 genome sequences of coronavirus in India.
The cases of new strain have also been reported in India – six on Tuesday and 14 today which took the total number of infected people to 20. The Union health ministry has said that all these people have been isolated separately, in different wards to check the spread of B117 variant.
The variant has also been found in Canada, Italy and the United Arab Emirates.