New Software Flags Emergence of COVID Variants
Summary
“The architecture of the COVID-19 pandemic is marked by periods of transition, tipping a population towards an emerging variant of concern, followed by its near complete sweep to dominance,” said Apurva Narechania, lead author of the new study and a senior bioinformaticist in the Museum’s Institute for Comparative Genomics. “Speed is key to responding to these evolving strains, but the traditional way of analyzing these sequences slows down surveillance techniques.” Working closely with colleagues in public health, Narechania looked to long-standing definitions of diversity that are used in ecology. “The viral surveillance we had during COVID-19 was a few weeks to months behind the edge of the pandemic curve,” said Barun Mathema, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a corresponding author on the study. “Our technique affords public health institutions the opportunity to create actionable policy based on a simple, quantitative measure.” Narechania didn’t originally set out to solve this particular disease surveillance issue. “The original intent was to reimagine how we understand microbial species, but after COVID emerged, we turned our attention to tracing the pandemic’s natural history and testing whether it could be an effective tool in disease monitoring.