By Arielle Kane
President Joe Biden told Americans not to panic about the omicron Covid-19 variant because the U.S. has “the best vaccine in the world, the best medicines, [and] the best scientists.” What the U.S. doesn’t have, however, is the best data. Although the country’s virus DNA sequencing has improved, its data infrastructure still isn’t robust enough to handle this and future pandemics.
When Biden assumed office, the U.S. was sequencing the DNA and thus identifying the viral strains of roughly 8,000 positive Covid-19 tests a week. Ten months later, U.S. labs are sequencing about 80,000 a week. Last week that amounted to one in seven PCR tests. This isn’t enough.
