Attachment

excellent public communicator, breaking down complex matters of epidemiology and genome sciences for his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. The U.S.--and, really, any country with a similarly patchwork system of testing and sequencing--needs to invest in many more projects that build on what we've learned in SCAN. One lesson is that we need to be setting up response systems well ahead of the next big outbreak, as the Seattle Flu Study and SCAN tried to do. Governments need to establish working relationships with infectious disease experts in the public and private sectors. Regulations need to allow the rapid approval of tests when a pathogen emerges that we've never seen before. America's world-class research institutions and its private diagnostics companies have incredible talent and capacity to help, but they should be able to get involved right away, without jumping through all the hoops that the SCAN team went through. The countries that get this done will be well positioned in the next major outbreak. It is no accident that South Africa, a country that has spent decades investing in testing and sequencing for its fight against HIV and TB, was the first to identify at least two major COVID variants. There are some innovations coming in genomic sequencing equipment that will help a lot. For example, Oxford Nanopore, a spinoff from Oxford University, has developed a portable gene sequencer that eliminates the need for a full laboratory. It does require an online computer with a powerful processor, but some researchers from Australia and Sri Lanka are working on solving that problem too: They created an app that allows the information from the sequencer to be processed offline, on a standard-issue smartphone. In one test, the app/sequencer combination was able to sequence COVID genomes from two patients in less than thirty minutes each. Oxford