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Martha Nelson, a senior biologist in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tracks variants of SARS-CoV-2 in as close to real time as possible. But linking viral genetic sequence data with details about the person that sample came from is often impossible, yet those details are crucial to understanding how the virus is spreading.
“It’s been painfully slow because there is no national system for data sharing and piles of red tape to get patient metadata needed to make a genetic sequence meaningful,” Nelson writes to The Scientist in an email. “The CDC has been leading efforts to get US sequencing higher in terms of volume, but the lack of coordination and sharing of data makes the information fragmented and hard to interpret.”
What would be ideal, she says, is marrying sequence data with contact tracing information, ...
