The report notes that U.S. virus tracking mechanisms lag far behind;
① The United States is reported to have lagged behind in many aspects of its response to the new pandemic — from the initial lack of testing to the current frantic and clumsy rollout of the new vaccine.
Lack of genetic monitoring is only one aspect;
② There is a reason why a more infectious variant of novel coronavirus was first discovered in the UK: there was a lot of genetic sequencing.
Since the outbreak, researchers in the UK have uploaded 151,859 sequences of new coronavirus individuals to the Global Initiative for Sharing Influenza Data, an international platform for sharing viral genome data.
Britain has the most shared genetic sequences in the world;
(3) If a more infectious novel coronavirus strain had first emerged in the United States, scientists might not have noticed it so quickly.
It is said that only 69,111 sequences have been uploaded to US laboratories so far, despite the fact that the US has a larger population than the UK, a cutting-edge biomedical research industry and tens of millions more Covid-19 cases.
(4) According to a report published by the National Academy of Sciences in July 2020, the current source of novel coronavirus genome sequence data…
In the US it is fragmented, often passive, reactive, uncoordinated, and underfunded.
It is insufficient to answer many pressing questions about the evolution and spread of novel coronavirus