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A comment on Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the 'bomb' in Wuhan market. Parent comment

Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by maxerickson on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @09:13AM (#26646827)
Seems like it wouldn't be that expensive to do routine genetic surveillance of symptomatic infections in regions of concern.

And of people that work with livestock.

Setting it up would be hard, and pulling the interesting data out of the firehouse would likely be hard.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by JulianMorrison on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @11:01AM (#26648184)
Sewage sampling can look for a specific germ, and has been used to track Covid and its variants.

We aren't realistically yet at a tech level where we DNA sequence everyone's minor sniffle just in case it's something new. But not too terribly far off it.

There evidently already are mechanisms in place to respond to alerts of new notable breakout diseases by DNA sequencing them, that happened to Covid very early.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Covid 'fuse' may have been lit weeks or months before the... by maxerickson on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @11:11AM (#26648307)
I think we have the tech, we are just bad at figuring out how much it would be worth to spend (underestimating the value by a lot).
[ Parent | on HN ]