Ómicron is a clothing rehearsal for the next infection

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Under no other circumstances would this have been significant: on Sunday, November 28, a San Francisco resident, Kovit, underwent a medical examination. The next day, it came out positive.

However, this person had recently returned from South Africa, where the newly discovered Omigran variant was widely alarmed.

The sample of the person who traveled was marked for priority genetic sequencing, which would reveal the genetic code of the virus that infected them, and determine if there were any omigran mutations that could tell them.

Chiu, a San Francisco microbiologist, was selected to do the sequencing. On Tuesday, November 30, at 6:00 pm, just hours after Xiu first learned about the model, he personally delivered it to his lab, where it was packed in dry ice.

Chiu and his colleagues quickly went to work. Although it took hours to create the entire sequence, the scientists chose to use a technique called nanopore sequencing, which allowed the results to be analyzed in real time while the process was in progress.

“As the data was collected, we were able to identify more and more mutations,” Chiu recalled.

Before dawn, he was sure: it’s Omigron, that’s it The first case was diagnosed In the United States. Less than a week has passed since South Africa publicly announced the variation.

We can’t fight what we can’t see, and preventing the next infection starts by detecting and monitoring the germs that threaten us. In that sense, at least Joseph Fawner, a geneticist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, says, “At least we’re significantly better than last year.”